Ethics, Diversity, and World Politics: Saving Pluralism From Itself? 0198733623, 9780198733621

Table of contents :
Acknowledgements
Contents
Introduction
1. Saving Pluralism from Itself?
2. Beyond Moral Scepticism, Statism, and Conservatism: Recasting Pluralist Approaches to International Society
3. Rethinking the Society of Sovereign States as a Pluralist Edifice: Community, Plurality, and Globalization
4. Institutions, Plurality, and Resistance
5. World Politics and the Pluralism of the Future, Rather than the Past
6. Pluralism Saved?
References
Index

Citation preview

Ethics, Diversity, and World Politics

Ethics, Diversity, and World Politics Saving Pluralism From Itself? John Williams

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Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries # John Williams 2015 The moral rights of the author have been asserted First Edition published in 2015 Impression: 1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2014948842 ISBN 978–0–19–873362–1 Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work.

Acknowledgements

At the back of a drawer in my desk there is a 3.5 inch diskette (google it, if you were born after about 1985) dated 2002. Fortunately, I no longer own any equipment that would enable me to open the files it contains, as I would probably find a copy of the presentation I gave to my prospective colleagues at Durham University when I was interviewed for a job in the spring of 2001. Part of that presentation included a list of things I hoped to publish in the following five years, should I be appointed. At the end of that five-year plan was a book on pluralism in the English school, and what could be done to reformulate and revive it. A first vote of thanks ought then to go to my colleagues, and especially my heads of department (Peter Stirk, Anoush Ehteshami, John Dumbrell, Jim Piscatori, and Emma Murphy), for their patience in the face of an eight-year delay in fulfilling that commitment. This book is, certainly, very different from what I had in mind in the spring of 2001 and, I hope, better and more interesting. Those improvements are the result of the chance that time has provided to discuss ideas and issues with a range of willing people who have shaped my thinking about this issue (and many others). I couldn’t hope to list them all, but this book wouldn’t take the form that it does without the chance to discuss normative issues with and enjoy the stimulating company of Will Bain, Ilan Baron, Chris Brown, Tim Dunne, Mervyn Frost, Kim Hutchings, Andrew Linklater, Richard Little, Cornelia Navari, Nick Rengger, Peter Stirk, and Hidemi Suganami. Others have had a more direct impact on the production of this book. I was very fortunate to enjoy an eight-week stay as a visiting scholar in the University of Queensland’s School of Political Science and International Studies during July and August 2010. The exceptionally generous financial support that was offered, in return for my thinking, writing, drinking coffee with faculty and graduate students, and presenting a talk at the end of my stay was fundamentally important to the early stages of this book. The first drafts of Chapters 1 and 2 were written during that period, and the intellectual trajectory of much of the rest of the book, especially the centrality of ‘community’, was established. I would very much like to thank Richard Shapcott, who acted as my sponsor (and much else), Richard Devetak, Matt McDonald,

Acknowledgements

Martin Weber, and Heloise Weber for their contribution to my work at that stage. Subsequently, and at times very slowly, this book has progressed. Its final production was made possible by the generous granting of research leave by Durham University during the first two terms of the 2013–14 academic year and, as final draft versions of chapters started to appear, the willingness of people to read and comment on them. Three people stand out: Cian O’Driscoll and Tony Lang both read the first four chapters of the book (having heard about what they would look like on several previous occasions) and offered supportive, and incisive, comments. Barry Buzan read the entire manuscript and his comments have sharpened the content and style of the final version considerably. I am extremely grateful to all three for their encouragement to complete this book. I was given the opportunity to present a version of Chapter 4 to staff and students at the University of Tubingen in October 2013 and I would like to thank Thomas Diez for the invitation and for making the trip so pleasurable, as well as intellectually stimulating. Further, two referees for Oxford University Press also read the manuscript and, again, helped me to clarify my thinking and writing in some important ways. They remain anonymous, but that doesn’t diminish my debt to them. Molly Cochran also read the manuscript for Oxford University Press and offered the most critical feedback during the process. That resulted in my revisiting the manuscript and making some significant changes that have hopefully improved the specificity of the argument. Dominic Byatt at Oxford University Press has also been very helpful and supportive in helping this book make the transition from proposal and initial manuscript to final product. I have not followed all of the advice I have received from the many people who have contributed directly and indirectly to this book. I hope they will forgive me for continuing to disagree with some of the points they have made. I certainly happily acknowledge that the many shortcomings of what follows are my responsibility alone. Finally, I thank my family for their love, support, and consideration. This book makes great play of the virtue of toleration, and they have displayed far more of it towards me than I have towards them, as my efforts to finish this book have exacerbated inherent shortness of temper, ill-humour, and impatience. This book is dedicated to Susan, Eleanor, and Thomas who, when all is said and done, provide 99 per cent of what is most valuable in my life (cycling and red wine probably being an alarmingly high, if disappointingly incompatible, proportion of the remainder).

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Contents

Introduction

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The Structure of the Book

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1. Saving Pluralism from Itself?

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Introduction The Case against Traditional Pluralism Recharacterizing Pluralism Pluralism as a Philosophically Plausible Position Pluralism as a Progressive Normative Agenda The Normative Significance of Context The Progressive Claim for Pluralism Conclusions: Pluralism and the Analysis of International Relations 2. Beyond Moral Scepticism, Statism, and Conservatism: Recasting Pluralist Approaches to International Society Introduction Pluralism, Methodology, and Normative Failure Different Knowledge Types ‘Transcendental’ Knowledge Narrative ‘Pragmatism’ Knowledge and Politics Conclusions: Knowledge and International Politics

9 9 19 19 25 27 31 33 36 36 39 45 48 51 58 60 68

3. Rethinking the Society of Sovereign States as a Pluralist Edifice: Community, Plurality, and Globalization

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Introduction Pluralism and Order in International Society Pluralism, Community, and the ‘International Community’ Change in International Society Conclusion

73 75 89 98 108

Contents

4. Institutions, Plurality, and Resistance Introduction Theorizing Institutions in the English School: Taxonomies and Compliance Pluralism and ‘Subaltern Institutions’ Operationalizing Pluralism and the Normativity of Institutions Conclusion

111 111 112 124 135 145

5. World Politics and the Pluralism of the Future, Rather than the Past

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Introduction Pluralism and Solidarism as Ideal Types and Empirical Enquiry Security, ‘Human Security’, and Pluralism Targeted Killing: Pluralism, Drones, and the Spaces of World Politics Pluralism and Global Distributive Justice Conclusion

149 150 155 162 169 177

6. Pluralism Saved? Introduction International System International Society World Society Conclusions References Index

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181 181 183 187 191 197 201 215

Introduction

The discussion of ethics and diversity in world politics is a subject that could exhaust innumerable volumes, so much so that the title of this one appears hubristic. My ambitions are, inevitably, more limited than the title may suggest, although the question mark at the end of the subtitle may be indicative of one way in which ambition, hopefully, avoids hubris. I aim to set out and defend a particular version of a pluralist ethic, developed within a specific intellectual context. I am sceptical about the possibility of establishing some sort of transcendental ‘truth’ in relation to ethics, but assertive of the value of philosophical endeavour in trying to make arguments that are rigorous, careful, and specific, with the goal of engaging others who may reject them. I aim to offer a reformulation of a pluralist ethical position that is worthy of serious consideration by thoughtful people. Pluralism as an ethical perspective on world politics takes a variety of possible forms and this book is overwhelmingly concerned with just one of them: the version of pluralism usually associated with the English school of international relations (IR) theory.1 That choice reflects my longstanding interest in this approach to IR theory (Williams 2002, 2005, 2010, 2011) and a desire to contribute to the revival of interest in it that has taken place over the last fifteen years or so. That revival has resulted in some major advances in English school theorizing, from the methodological (e.g. Navari 2009a) and analytical (e.g. Buzan 2004) to the normative (e.g. Navari 2013), that have helped to better establish the English school’s intellectual credentials and also to make it a more prominent contributor to the wider theoretical debates within the academic discipline of IR. As is often noted, Stephen Krasner (quoted in Buzan 2004, 11) identified the English school as being the bestknown sociological theory of international relations.

1 As with almost all other books in the field, I shall use the convention of International Relations (IR) to refer to the academic discipline, and international relations to refer to the field of empirical practice that forms its main subject of study.

Ethics, Diversity, and World Politics

Many other important statements have sought to develop and enhance the classic English school approach, rooted in reflection on international political practice that deploys the English school’s methodological open-mindedness and interest in history, law, philosophy, and sociology to develop theory in a self-consciously applied way (e.g. Wheeler 2000; Jackson 2000; Hurrell 2007). These advances and contributions have, however, left relatively untouched the account of pluralism within the English school. What is distinct about this account of a pluralist ethic is that it is focused on international relations as being dominated by the relations between states who, through shared rules, norms, and principles of behaviour, form an international society (Bull 1977). This international society, as it has historically evolved, offers a means of enabling states to achieve certain, minimal, common goods of maintaining a degree of order in their relations and avoiding the worst excesses of violence and chaos, despite the absence of any sort of reliable overarching authority structures or consensus on many basic ethical ideas. The limited nature of the common good is in significant part a reflection of the diverse ethical positions adopted by the world’s many political communities, imperfectly instantiated through the 190 or so sovereign states presently in existence. This international society is a relatively fragile construct in the traditional pluralist view. Its rules and principles of behaviour are challenged by those who would reject them in favour of a radically different vision of world order. That may be because states seek to tear up rules they see as inimical to the pursuit of power political interests, or feel compelled to pursue narrowly construed and short-term gains over long-term compliance with the rules. Or it may be through alternative conceptions of world order that reject the centrality of sovereignty in favour of alternative political arrangements, such as a global empire, a universal community of humankind, a religiously based universal system, or some sort of multilevelled and multifaceted authority structure. Bull (1977) offered a useful consideration of some of these alternatives in the final third of his seminal work, The Anarchical Society. Barry Buzan and Richard Little (2000) have offered a historical assessment of how international relations has been ordered historically. I will return to some of these points later, and elaborate on this thumbnail sketch of the English school and its pluralist dimension at length throughout the book. What matters at this point is to establish a small number of basic starting points that I derive from the English school, and especially its pluralist position. My goal in the rest of the book is to show why pretty much all of these should be rejected, and for a wide range of reasons. That will explain the book’s subtitle more fully: that the account of pluralism that the English school traditionally works with is almost wholly inadequate and retaining it threatens to fundamentally undermine the valuable contribution that a

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Introduction

pluralist ethical perspective can make to understanding international political practice. Hence the claim that pluralism needs saving from itself. The first of the starting points that I take from what I will call ‘traditional pluralism’ is that international relations is, essentially, interstate relations and that the international society of states exists in relative isolation from other dimensions of what I will call ‘world politics’ in an effort to capture political dynamics that clearly transcend states’ territorial borders, but which are not led by states. Attempting to maintain, both analytically and normatively, the separation of ‘international’ and ‘world’ dimensions of politics is, I will suggest, unsustainable. The separate, distinctive, and special character of the rules, norms, and principles of international society, and the underpinning account of the nature of ethics that holds them together, needs to be replaced. That does not mean that such rules, norms, and principles are unimportant, unethical, or trivial. They are none of those three things, but they are inadequate as a basis for the ethical analysis of world politics and for the defence of the normative centrality of pluralism to world politics. This points to what is one of the most important claims I seek to make: that traditional pluralism reduces ethical diversity to an empirical observation about the world, albeit one with normatively significant consequences. It does not, indeed it cannot, offer an ethical defence of pluralism: that such diversity is a moral good. The second starting point is traditional pluralism’s acknowledgement of the historically evolved character of international society (e.g. Watson 1992). This connects to the idea of English school theory as being a sociological theory in important ways, and not just because it puts at the centre of its analysis something labelled ‘international society’. More important is one of the English school’s most important claims: that competing social dynamics are in constant interplay in international society. However, the society in which traditional pluralism is interested is usually very narrowly construed by its focus on states and, typically, those states that are most powerful, for example via Bull’s (1977) focus on the ‘great powers’. That also results in conservatism: the fragility of international society and its state centrism results in a normative project that is focused on the preservation of the established rules, norms, and principles of behaviour, with innovation limited to incremental adjustment (e.g. Jackson 2000; Mayall 2000). That conservatism is motivated by fear that one of the other competing dynamics—the amoral, asocial power politics of a Hobbesian state of nature—may overcome the fragile bulwarks of order. Radical overhaul, and especially radical overthrow, of international society to tackle ethical challenges at levels other than the interstate, whether they are global issues such as distributive justice or local ones such as state collapse resulting in ethnic cleansing, brings too many risks of undermining order amongst states. Detailed elaboration of this claim comes later, but seeing ethics as a social practice, rather than a set of abstract philosophical rules, which change over 3

Ethics, Diversity, and World Politics

time and in different contexts, is central to my argument. However, greatly expanding the realm of social practice considered by pluralism is crucial: state centrism is unsustainable, especially if pluralism is to establish persuasive claims to be a progressive, even radical, ethical approach. Progressivism is understood here as requiring a basis on which it is possible to make clear and persuasive claims about forms of political behaviour, organization, and thought that are ethically indefensible and to establish certain trends in behaviour, organization, and thought as ethically desirable. Pluralism must be able to make a case to prefer certain political forms and ideas over others on a philosophically persuasive basis. That requires a much more thoroughgoing engagement with political and moral philosophy than is usually associated with English school pluralism, which relies, instead, on a poorly worked out methodology (e.g. Mayall 2009) or an appeal to the need to view the world from the perspective of senior statespeople, concerned with the need to uphold and maintain the fragile order amongst states (e.g. Jackson 2009). Third, I take from the English school account of pluralism an understanding that pluralism is a communal phenomenon: it manifests itself in the ways that human communities come to develop distinctive, sometimes irreconcilable, accounts of what is ethically correct. Even where communities have to tackle common questions that must be answered for communal life to be possible, they often arrive at strikingly different solutions. For traditional English school pluralism that points to an ethic of ‘live and let live’, associated in the interstate realm with the non-intervention principle. Agreement to disagree about the substantive meaning of, for instance, justice, equality, liberty, rights, and representation will reduce potential sources of conflict, enabling states to get along a little better by reducing the potential for one state or group of states to seek to impose, violently if necessary, its account of justice, equality, liberty, and so on. The historical experience of such projects, from religiously inspired crusades, to colonial notions of the mission civilisatrice, to totalitarian political projects, is usually understood as providing reasons aplenty as to why such an interstate modus vivendi is valuable. The argument made below is not that this point is invalid, but that it is unsustainably narrow because of its focus on the state as both the manifestation of political community and a member of a very distinctive and largely separate political community of states. Recognizing the ethical significance of the enormous range of dynamic and interacting communities that human beings belong to, from which they take value, and to which they contribute in ways that give value to others is a core feature of my argument. Pluralism needs to develop a more philosophically sophisticated account of community and its connection to ethics, but one that retains the value of being derived from and responsive to the historical experiences of actual communities and their interactions with one another. Crucially, I defend a position that 4

Introduction

recognizes and accepts the accelerating reality of individuals’ simultaneous membership of multiple communities, establishing powerful normative tensions in how they understand and respond to particular political situations and circumstances. I am, therefore, somewhat sceptical about the possibility of seeing, for example, the individual rights-based account of the sovereign liberal subject as the irreducible minimum of human ethical significance, such that all other ethical claims are admissible only to the extent that they do not conflict with that subjectivity. That is not to dismiss the importance of that account of ethics—far from it—but it is, in line with the English school’s interest in lived political experience, to argue for its being a manifestation of a particular lived experience and one that is necessarily in tension with, even contradictory of, others (for a powerful account of rights as prior to other, cultural forms of ethics, see Caney 2001). These three features of traditional English school pluralism therefore serve as bases for a revision or, as I label it in this book, a ‘revival’ of pluralism in English school theory. I prefer the term ‘revived pluralism’ to an alternative like ‘new pluralism’ because what I aim to do is to work within the English school tradition of IR theory. The reworking of pluralism that I propose is far reaching, even fundamental in important regards, but it does, nevertheless, retain commitment to the idea that the English school offers certain central benefits to understanding world politics. Its historical sensitivity, its normative engagement, its methodological open-mindedness, and its recognition of the constant interplay of competing dynamics are all features I not only retain in my revival of pluralism, but which I hope to augment. Further, the basic commitment to the necessary contribution of diverse and multidisciplinary insights into the condition of world politics is also something that is characteristically English school and that is repeated here. Whilst the account of pluralism I develop ultimately bears little resemblance to the traditional pluralism of Robert Jackson (2000) or Hedley Bull (1977), I contend that it is, nevertheless, a distinctively ‘English school’ form of pluralism.

The Structure of the Book The book is organized to reflect the extent of the reformulation of English school pluralism that I argue is necessary. Chapter 1 thus offers a detailed assessment of the reasons for the widespread dissatisfaction with, or outright rejection of, the contribution traditional pluralism is able to make to understanding world politics. There are several elements involved in this diagnosis, but central to it, and to the revival I attempt subsequently, is the claim that pluralism must be based on a commitment to the ethical desirability of a world of ethically diverse human communities. It thus challenges the ontology of 5

Ethics, Diversity, and World Politics

traditional English school pluralist accounts, but without adopting the most common alternative, which is to appeal to the irreducibility of the individual human being as a rights holder. The chapter explains both why this is the case and how such an account can be constructed, which comes to be focused around the ontological significance of diversity and community, drawing principally on political and sociological theory indebted to Hannah Arendt. This is territory I have explored previously (e.g. Williams 2002, 2005; Williams and Lang 2005), but which is developed here in terms not of providing a basis for normative assessment of particular political phenomena but as a means of establishing an ontology of world politics that can sustain a properly pluralist position. Plurality becomes the central ontological claim for a revived pluralism—that, in Arendt’s (1958, 8) phrase—‘Plurality is the condition of human action because we are all the same, that is, human, in such a way that nobody is ever the same as anyone else who ever lived, lives or will live.’ Chapter 2 continues the foundational work necessary for revising pluralism, developing a methodology for how the fundamental problems identified in Chapter 1 can be overcome. These problems, identified as moral scepticism, statism, and conservatism, lead me to develop an account of the epistemological element of the project. This looks at how different knowledge forms are essential to ethics as the dynamic outcome of human interactions and how ethics relates to the concept of community such that it becomes possible to avoid an account of pluralism that is morally relativist. To somewhat overstate the argument at this stage, Chapter 2 argues that ethics are an epistemological phenomenon: they are rooted in and manifest the outcome of inter and intracommunity debates about how that community understands the nature of truth, its place in the world, and the ways in which political action occurs. Stressing the dynamism of community, I argue that communities characterized by sclerosis and intolerance are ethically indefensible. Having undertaken ground clearing and foundation laying in Chapters 1 and 2, Chapter 3 moves to territory more familiar to English school theory by offering a reassessment of ‘international society’. This looks to reconsider the reasons for its status as the centrepiece of English school theory, by looking again at the nature of ‘order’ as an ethical value and by considering how it is that a range of trends usually lumped together as globalization are impacting on the nature of international society. My argument here is that a revived pluralist position can overcome the static and separate account of international society offered by traditional pluralism through refocusing the notion of international society in relation to the diversity of human communities that are entangled in world politics. The society of states is one, important, instance of this, but acknowledgement of the diversity of communities engaged in world politics, and that human beings are simultaneously members of multiple communities making competing, conflicting, and contradictory normative 6

Introduction

demands, offers greater analytical insight into the nature and significance of international society. That requires some elaboration on the concept of ‘community’, including establishing it as a verb as well as a noun, in order to better capture the English school’s traditional emphasis on the constant interaction of competing dynamics. In particular, a focus on community and communities enables a more normatively powerful way of understanding and assessing change in comparison with traditional pluralism. Chapter 4 extends this analysis of how a revived pluralism reforms English school theory to look at the concept of institutions. These are understood as durable patterns of social practice, and I follow Barry Buzan’s (2004) approach of identifying primary institutions (the durable social practices) and secondary institutions (the organizations usually with secretaries general, headquarters, and staff). The principal innovation I offer here is to argue that English school accounts of institutions take for granted the institutions that exist as being the ones that matter, privileging established patterns of practice and powerful states and organizations without sufficient justification, labelling behaviour that departs from institutional strictures as deviant. Instead, I argue that a revived pluralism can provide the basis for recognizing the primary institution of ‘resistance’ as an overlooked element of the institutional make up of world politics. Drawing on subaltern understandings of political action (e.g. Guha and Spivak 1988), I characterize resistance as being communal efforts to sidestep, bypass, undermine, and subvert dominant accounts of political order, often drawing on communities that reject or ignore dominant social, spatial, economic, and political reference points. These may be about preserving old ways of communal life, or they may be about developing new ones— usually on the back of old ones—but they are distinct from deviance. A revived pluralism, the chapter concludes, offers unique insight into patterns and practices of resistance and the normative value of adopting the subaltern perspective. This lays the basis for the claim that a revived pluralism is a progressive, even radical, ethical position. Indeed, I suggest that that revived pluralism is more progressive than the liberal cosmopolitan position usually labelled ‘solidarism’ in English school debates. Chapter 5 seeks to demonstrate the insights a revived pluralism can offer into some key contemporary political challenges. These are chosen on the basis that they are ones traditional pluralism is usually, and correctly, seen as being ill-equipped to address. I therefore look at debates about human security, targeted killing, and distributive justice in order to show that abandoning traditional pluralism’s requirement to shoehorn such problems into a normative agenda focused on interstate order enables far richer analysis and assessment. The goal, therefore, is to show that a revived pluralism is not just more theoretically and ethically satisfying and persuasive than traditional pluralism, but that it is far more analytically and normatively powerful. 7

Ethics, Diversity, and World Politics

Finally, Chapter 6 seeks to offer a broad assessment of how a revived pluralism can contribute to wider debates within contemporary English school theory such that it can help to shape the research agenda across the school in years to come. This takes the form of assessing how revived pluralism impacts on the three elements of the traditional English school framework: international system, international society, and world society (Wight 1991). Much of this synthesizes the elements of analysis in earlier chapters that relate to these three elements, but Chapter 6 goes beyond synthesis to suggest that the more radical moves within English school theory, led by Buzan (2004), to reformulate and reconfigure these elements are correct. I argue that the category of international system has little value, analytically or normatively, and could be disposed of. International society requires substantial overhaul and world society needs to be refocused on the lived experience of human communities. Chapter 6 also identifies some of the questions that, unavoidably, have been left hanging and where further research offers hope of extending, refining, and improving the argument made here. This sketch will hopefully help readers navigate their way through the text. Crudely put, Chapters 1 and 2 diagnose why pluralism needs saving from itself, and the kind of philosophical and methodological reform necessary to make that possible. Chapters 3 and 4 apply those reforms to conventional English school theory to show how a revived pluralism can generate powerful analytical and normative insight into world politics by utilizing significantly revised accounts of international society and institutions. Chapter 5 looks to substantiate these claims by looking at how a revived pluralism can engage with questions traditional pluralism struggles to understand. Chapter 6 suggests how the wider English school research agenda will be affected by engagement with a revived pluralism, and the benefits that may bring in the future. It is, therefore, time to turn to the first of these tasks. Why is it that pluralism finds itself in need of saving from itself, and how might that task be attempted?

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1 Saving Pluralism from Itself?

Introduction My goal in this book is both simple and (over)ambitious. I aim to outline a case for, and basis upon which, the pluralist position within the English school can be understood as a theoretically plausible and ethically progressive normative proposition. The initial task, addressed in this chapter, is to make a case for the need to revive the pluralist position within the English school and to identify what sort of benefits may flow from doing so. That is the three-stage agenda here: what is wrong with pluralism, how those flaws might be addressed, and why this is a necessary endeavour. The next section addresses the first of these questions, with the second and third taken together in the final section of the chapter.

The Case against Traditional Pluralism Even without detail as to how such a revival works through into a reformulated pluralism, the ambition in this purpose is likely to be evident to anyone familiar with the trajectory of English school theorizing over the last twenty years. Since the end of the Cold War, the trend within English school theory has, on the whole, been to explore and promote the solidarist potential of the school’s theoretical framework in order to better establish its normative claims whilst simultaneously rooting those in a refashioned analysis of the realities of international relations that is more open to non-state actors and nonWestphalian dynamics. Two landmark English school texts may serve as exemplars of this trend: Nicholas Wheeler’s Saving Strangers (2000) and Andrew Hurrell’s On Global Order (2007). The opportunities arising from the removal of the shadow of global nuclear annihilation and the suffocation of superpower stand-off have been fairly routinely cast as favourable to solidarism, both analytically and, my main concern in this book, normatively. The growing

Ethics, Diversity, and World Politics

importance of human rights, the efforts to establish a doctrine of humanitarian intervention, the spread of more or less successful facsimiles of liberal democracy, and the liberalizing dynamics of economic globalization and the development of global law are all quite routinely cited (e.g. Hurrell 2007, 58–65). As Hurrell’s (2007) justly lauded landmark book on the concept of order notes, the development of an increasingly solidarist global order in the last twenty-five years has put down far deeper roots than was previously possible, both empirically in terms of the impact of solidarist ideas on state practice, and intellectually in the way that solidarist ideas have become part of mainstream theorizing in IR. His judgement on the implications for pluralism is both bleak and unambiguous, ‘there is no acceptable or viable way of asserting a pluralist view of international society’ (Hurrell 2007, 292). Pluralism may retain some recognition as a viable explanatory proposition, one capable of elucidating some aspects of contemporary state practice in international relations, perhaps particularly practice associated with some of the world’s less liberal regimes. The entry in the positive side of this normative ledger—the maintenance of a degree of order amongst the world’s states—is insufficiently compelling to offset this cost. International society is increasingly accurately cast as a ‘global gangster’ (Wheeler 1996): a social order that establishes a protection racket whereby the strong prey on the weak and present their predation and privilege as being in the best interest of their victims, whose options to resist, protest, or withdraw from the racket are, effectively, purely nominal. Two texts typically dominate the mainstream account of pluralism in the English school, and justifiably so: Hedley Bull’s The Anarchical Society (1977) and Robert Jackson’s The Global Covenant (2000). As exemplars of the traditional pluralist position, some brief elaboration on their main claims is worthwhile in helping to get to grips with the nature and scale of the pluralist problem. Despite being separated by over twenty years, during which time the basic political structure of the world was shaken to its core by the end of the Cold War, these are in many ways quite similar books. Their deployment of a ‘classical’ methodology, their focus on interstate politics (Jackson’s book notably contains not even an index entry for ‘globalization’) and their emphasis on the difficulties and dangers of sustaining interstate order as the sine qua non of global politics are amongst the common features. Bull and Jackson are not alone, of course, in developing this account of traditional pluralism, and one could look also at the work of James Mayall (1990, 2000) and Alan James (1993) for important, if less frequently cited, examples. The lessons that are usually drawn from these texts are that pluralism is statist, nationalist, and exclusivist, although all three of those terms require a little elaboration. Statism is perhaps the most straightforward and it would require quite a feat of imagination to offer a recognizable account of traditional 10

Saving Pluralism from Itself?

English school pluralism that does not put the sovereign state, in ‘Westphalian’ guise, front and centre. The notion of states as unified, interest-maximizing actors characterized by a claim to sovereignty that stresses territorial integrity and absolute political authority is a commonplace of traditional pluralism. The nationalist dimension, most thoroughly explored by James Mayall (1990), adds an additional layer of sophistication and depth to this characterization of the state. Mayall explores how, during the nineteenth century, nationalism, and the concomitant notion of national self-determination, became embedded in the idea of sovereignty that pluralism deploys and how pluralism sees nationalism within the set of norms, principles, and ideas that constitutes an international society to the extent that it stands as one of the ‘primary institutions’ of international society (Buzan 2004). Nationalism contributes significantly, in turn, to the exclusivist claim about pluralism. This works in several ways. First, pluralist international society is exclusivist in that it typically rejects, or at least renders subservient, non-state actors. Whether it be international organizations, economic entities, nonstate modes of social and political organization, or, indeed, just about any other possible player on the international stage, pluralism typically rejects its importance in comparison with states. Only states can be members of international society and only states are major actors in international relations. There is an additional, if implicit, normative claim, too: not only is this an empirical claim about the nature of world politics, this is the way things should be. Alternative forms of international society that are not state centric risk undermining the basic value of order, without which any possibility for international society to achieve ‘higher’ goals is in grave doubt (Williams 2006). The account of international society that emerges is therefore focused on the preservation of a limited set of rules, norms, and principles of behaviour that have evolved amongst states over time and through practice to enable the preservation of a minimal order amongst themselves. Bull (1977, 4–5, 16–18) famously identified three areas in which such rules must exist for us to be able to talk of an international society: rules restricting the recourse to violence; rules defining the nature of property ownership and transfer; and rules establishing the nature of binding agreements. These rules are operationalized, and international society itself manifested, through the development of institutions that reflect the nature of the basic social agreement shared by states. Bull (1977, 101–231) identified five such institutions: war, international law, diplomacy, great power management, and the balance of power. An international society can ‘thicken’ by augmenting these rules with others that extend the issues brought within international society’s purview and also through the mechanisms of what Buzan (2004) labels ‘secondary’ institutions. These include bodies like the United Nations (UN) and other international 11

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governmental bodies and also less formal ‘regimes’ that enable less formal management of key issues (e.g. Krasner 1983). These institutions, in both the sense of relatively stable and durable patterns of social practice amongst states, and the sense of a formal bureaucratic organization typically rooted in treaty, are seen as the product of the consent of states. States’ possession of sovereignty means that they cannot accept that one or other of their number, or an institution they choose to create, can possess the authority necessary to prescribe law for all. This minimal account means that international society possesses a comparatively limited normative agenda: the preservation of international society itself being the most important normative goal. Ensuring relatively peaceful and stable coexistence amongst states, characterized by a ‘Westphalian’ notion of sovereignty and inhabiting a world in which power and security competitions are inherent and inescapable, may not sound like much of a normative agenda. It is, though, contrasted with a concept of ‘international system’ that takes the form analogous to a Hobbesian state of nature and which is assumed to be a real alternative constellation of international politics. In addition to this core challenge, international society’s ability to offer a more extensive normative agenda is compromised further by the lack of agreement amongst culturally diverse states on what constitutes justice, progress, rights, and just about every other term within normative theoretical debate. The diversity of the world’s societies and cultures, across space and time, means that any efforts to agree on the substantive content of such terms is going to be particularistic and coercive, threatening the fragile foundations of order. However, states can agree not to allow such disagreement to endanger the achievement of a workable consensus on violence, property, and agreement in the lives of states. This brief summary of the typical accounts of pluralism is necessarily crude and contestable, but it certainly seems close enough to Hurrell’s (2007, 27–54) depiction that provides my jumping off point for this project. More important than its verisimilitude, though, is the wider account that it offers of pluralism as a result of the historical development of interstate practice within a specific cultural and normative milieu. Pluralism is not a normative theory because it does not rest upon a particularly well worked out or sophisticated philosophical basis, as characterizes some of its challengers. Indeed, Bull was clear in The Anarchical Society (1977, x) that he made no particular claims to ‘refined theoretical technique nor . . . recondite historical research’ (and a good job too, some will argue, as to contemporary eyes the book may appear to lack both). Instead, there is a portrayal of pluralism as being the result of evolved historical practice, in which different modes of political organization (including non-state actors as well as different forms of statehood) have interacted and competed to initiate and evolve a constellation of ideas and modes of 12

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behaviour that constitute the very nature of the actors, as well as prescribing and proscribing specific practices. The historical experience that is central in this story is principally that of the European states and of a rather partial (in both senses) account of their colonizing activities. This has, so the story goes, brought about a uniform, global system of sovereign states, for the first time in human history, and has entrenched this through the universalization of sovereignty norms. As a result we have a relatively stable global political system that is normatively acceptable to states as its constitutive members and agents.1 The empirical phenomenon of pluralism is, therefore, historically constructed and embedded. The normative proposition of traditional English school pluralism thus makes no grand, abstract claims to normative authority and, indeed, is typically deeply sceptical, even hostile, towards those who do on the basis that they are, no matter how well intentioned, a threat to the consensus that establishes order. Pluralism amongst states is normatively defensible because of the ‘realities’ of an international politics that is characterized by anarchy and inhabited principally by states that manifest, to varying extents, diverse, incommensurable, or even downright hostile cultures. The best that can be done is a modus vivendi based around an agreement to disagree on most issues in order to avoid those conflictual tendencies running out of control. The normative value of pluralism is derived from and thus secondary to the accuracy of its account of the empirical realities of international relations. Within traditional English school work, this perspective is usually seen as having been challenged by John Vincent, particularly in his 1986 book Human Rights and International Relations. Vincent’s ‘solidarism’ and ostensible advocacy of a far more ethically universal perspective on IR has been reconsidered by Jennifer Welsh (2011) as instead offering a normative case for pluralism. As this is exactly what this book seeks to develop, it is necessary to explain why I see Welsh’s argument as unconvincing. At its root lies the same problem with traditional pluralism: Welsh does not offer a normative defence of pluralism. Instead, she takes Vincent’s account of it as an empirical phenomenon—a fact about ‘the society of states as it is’ (Welsh 2011, 1202, emphasis in the original)2—and supports Vincent’s conclusions that ‘righteous intervention will be perceived as imperialism’ (Welsh 2011, 1202). Given the danger of 1 This summary is a drastic compression of the accounts of the historical development of international society found within two ‘classic’ English school texts on this issue—Bull and Watson’s The Expansion of International Society (1984) and Watson’s (1992) The Evolution of International Society. An excellent critique of the curious portrayal of colonialism in these accounts is offered by Keene’s Beyond the Anarchical Society (2002). Greater historical perspective comes with Buzan and Little (2000) and a critique of the Western-centric account of standard English school history is offered by, amongst others, John Hobson (2004, 2012a). 2 Welsh is quoting Vincent at this point (1986, 118) and the emphasis, as Welsh notes, is not present in Vincent’s original text.

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generating large-scale war where liberal states to seek to impose their views on others, ‘the compromise set of rules that maintain international order has to acknowledge the [sovereign] equality (if not the domestic legitimacy) of those [states] whom we might disrespect, but whom we cannot overcome by force’ (Welsh 2011, 1202). Welsh hears clear echoes of this account of Vincent’s prudential, pragmatic pluralism in contemporary debates about the extent to which humanitarian intervention and the Responsibility to Protect have been adopted in international society and how far its advocates ought to go in its promotion (Welsh 2011, 1196–202). Andrew Hurrell (2013) has made broadly similar arguments, too: that the changing pattern of global order brought about by the rise of the ‘BRICS’ (Brazil, Russia, India, and China as emerging great powers of the future) means that it is important to reassess more aggressive cosmopolitan liberal projects. That does not cause Hurrell to embrace thoroughgoing pluralist logics, but instead he recognizes the need for appropriate prudence in the pace and direction of the transformation of world order. None of this, though, amounts to a comprehensive normative defence of pluralism. Accepting limitations on cosmopolitan projects in international relations, most prominently universal human rights, are unavoidable. However, this is not because such an acceptance is morally correct, but because of prudential concerns for the consequences of more decisive action and in recognition of the ineffectiveness of arguments to persuade those who insist on refusing to see the ‘truth’ of this cosmopolitanism. This standard account of pluralism is in need of challenge, if pluralism is to be saved from the position to which Hurrell consigns it. In particular, I want to argue that there is a significant mismatch between the traditional pluralist position outlined above and the standard accounts of its solidarist counterpart. Most importantly, the historical construction and social embedding of pluralism is typically assumed to take place as the result of pragmatic, power-dominated political manoeuvring, and therefore to be bordering on the vacuous in terms of its significant theoretical and, especially, philosophical content. This is in contrast to solidarism, which, even accepting that it exists in several guises (Hurrell 2007, 58), almost always offers a richer and more sophisticated philosophical account of itself. As Hurrell notes (2007, 48), ‘The normative base for pluralism is often based on scepticism’, but that is not true of solidarism. There are several lines of philosophical enquiry that may result in a commitment to solidarism and they are all characterized by a serious engagement with important philosophical figures. This variety includes a liberal solidarism stemming, ultimately, from Locke via most of the major liberal accounts of rights and underpinning contemporary emphases on human rights (e.g. Wheeler 2000); and a legal solidarism that 14

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stems from Grotius (e.g. Bull 1992, 2000 [1966]; Kingsbury and Roberts 1992), or at least a reading of Grotius that has come in for much recent criticism (Jeffery 2006; Keene 2002). Thoughtful and sophisticated engagement with serious issues of moral philosophy—such as the nature of the individual as a moral agent—and of political philosophy—such as the proper relationship between the citizen and authoritative institutions of the state—are commonplace (e.g. Hurrell 2007, 65–6). Such accounts, of course, are subject to philosophical challenge, as are any accounts of such fundamental issues, but they are usually assumed to be grounded in plausible and persuasive analyses of these problems, typically via natural rights and/or natural law type accounts of fundamental philosophical claims about the nature of right and good in human affairs. Pluralism’s rejection of these modes of thinking is heavily influenced by Bull’s moral scepticism, which took a radical form, especially in his earlier work (Jeffery 2008). Contemporary manifestations of solidarism and accounts of its historical development therefore imply a contrast between the theoretical and philosophical sophistication of solidarism and the power-based and pragmatic political development of pluralism. Where pluralism is granted foundations, these are often cast more in terms of positivist accounts of international law, or a political theory of the state indebted to the political realist tradition, both sharing an emphasis on a version of state sovereignty that reaches its apogee in the later stages of the nineteenth century (e.g. Stirk 2012). Solidarism’s normative superiority thus tends to be assumed because of the importance of theoretical and philosophical sophistication in grounding normative accounts. Certainly, there are some potentially rather unflattering theoretical comparisons to be drawn between leading contemporary solidarist accounts of international society (e.g. Linklater 1998; Linklater and Suganami 2006) and the benchmark accounts of pluralism identified above (Bull 1977; Jackson 2000). However, before accepting those comparisons it is necessary to offer an account of pluralism that at least attempts to investigate its theoretical and philosophical bases, to see if the cupboard is as bare as tends to be asserted. If the cupboard is, indeed, pretty bare, as I hope to demonstrate, that will give me a basis on which to rebuild by identifying where the key challenges lie. There are, I suggest, three key problems with those pluralist accounts that any restatement needs to tackle. The first is that the claim to be dealing with ‘reality’ is not, actually, realist in the philosophical sense of that term. The realist commitment to an objective, knowable reality is not one that is necessarily shared by most standard pluralist accounts. This is despite the justification often put forward that the restricted normative agenda they offer is an inevitable result of the limitations imposed by life in the ‘real world’ and its commensurate restrictions on what political actors are able to achieve 15

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(Jackson (2000) is a particularly good example of this claim). These accounts, instead, rely on philosophically indeterminate accounts of the nature of the material and social reality of international politics and the resultant limitations and restrictions on normative potential. That may be no bad thing, but we cannot judge that in relation to the usual portrayal of pluralism, because there is no systematic effort to justify why one should adopt, or not adopt, a properly realist account of the nature of the world. Perhaps the most famous defence of a pluralist method, Bull’s (1966) account of the ‘classical approach’, really does not stand much critical scrutiny on this score. A commitment to philosophical realism need not result in a highly materialist account of international relations, such as neo-realism (Waltz 1979), as Alexander Wendt’s (1999) self-consciously philosophically realist account of the social construction of international relations shows. Indeed, Wendt’s account bears more than a passing resemblance to English school theory, as noted by several analysts (e.g. Dunne 1995) and has been central to Buzan’s (2004) effort at rebuilding English school theory as a much more self-consciously constructivist approach with enhanced analytical power. Whether or not a social constructivism indebted to Wendt offers the most appropriate basis for a revived pluralism can be set aside for the moment. What this point does try to establish is that the charge levelled at pluralism of being philosophically and methodologically unsophisticated is not without merit. Addressing this problem is a key task for any effort at reviving pluralism as a theoretically plausible position, given the enormous change in the level of methodological sophistication in IR theory over the last thirty to forty years. This is the principal focus of the second section of this chapter and Chapter 2. In addition to this lack of methodological clarity in the empirical basis of traditional pluralist claims about the constraints imposed by international political ‘reality’, the account offered of the reasons for the diversity of human identities, moralities, and polities is also problematic. Telling the historical story of the interaction of diverse identities and how this has generated conflict is as far as most accounts get. James Mayall’s (1990) analysis of nationalism’s impact on international society considers different explanations of nationalism and the different paths through which nationalist political programmes became important. However, his principal concern is with how international society’s rules, norms, and practices were affected and the way in which nationalism served to reinforce the distinctive pluralist agenda of order in conditions of anarchy and diversity. Nationalism’s normative quality is not a key focus, even though the normative implications of its impact are central to Mayall’s book. This is important to the emphasis placed on exclusion and identity in pluralism: the insurmountable nature of these problems and their tendency to generate power and security dynamics in international politics are an almost ‘natural’ outcome of this historical 16

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process. However, this account of the natural facts of international politics is not connected to a proper account of how and why this is the case. In contrast with solidarist accounts of the nature of universal humanity, stemming from God or reason, for instance, pluralists are typically unable to offer any good answer to questions about what it is that is ‘natural’ about diversity and subsequent conflictual tendencies. The ‘fact’ of diversity and its role in conflict between polities that are, in part, characterized by the diverse ethical positions they propound is enough. This simply has to be addressed in revival of a pluralist position. There are two obvious lines of enquiry here, but neither is taken up to any great extent in traditional pluralism. The first, and here pluralists are hardly unique amongst IR theorists over the past sixty years at least, is to appeal to human nature; demanding some sort of psychological, or even psychoanalytical, account of being human that generates the kinds of patterns of behaviour that result in a pluralist international society. Most accounts of human nature in IR are regarded as pitiably crude and the discipline as a whole has steered clear of looking at this question for several decades. There are recent signs of a return to the human nature question, and also a reappraisal of assertions that the appeals to human nature by canonical figures such as Morgenthau are in some sense embarrassing. In an important book, Robert Schuett (2010), for example, argues that all realist theory, including neo-realism, is indebted to a theory of human nature and that the key, if denied, figure in this realist theory of human nature is Sigmund Freud. This serves to highlight the point here about the lack of properly considered and defended grounds for claims about the ‘naturalness’ of diversity, conflict, and power and security, and how these limit the potential for anything more than a rather shallow society of states. Alternatively, in place of human nature, pluralism could offer a sophisticated sociological account of the causes of difference, but, again, it does not do so. There are insightful historical accounts of the development of key identities shaping political ideas, most notably Mayall’s (1990) account of how nationalism has affected international society, but this does not take a sustained and sophisticated sociological turn, instead preferring historical narrative and an assessment of the politics of national identity. Standard figures in sociological accounts of the state and its relationship to society (Weber and Mills, for instance) are absent save for the occasional restatement of Weber’s classic claim about sovereignty being a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence. A serious assessment of what Weber meant by legitimacy and how it was so importantly linked to violence never follows in traditional pluralist accounts. Equally, where more contemporary sociological theorizing has been brought into contact with English school thinking, such as critical theory indebted to Habermas (Linklater 1998) or the hermeneutics of Gadamer (Shapcott 2001), it has usually been 17

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done in the name of solidarism. Again, this needs to be addressed in a revived pluralism, and Chapter 2 will offer some more detailed suggestions. Digging into the theoretical and philosophical roots of traditional pluralism, there are appeals to necessity. A limited account of an international society focused on the protection of international order amongst sovereign states is necessary if international society is to avoid its own destruction and the reassertion of a far more violent, ‘Hobbesian’, dynamic. The problem with appeals to necessity, of course, is that they are normatively inappropriate. Just because something ‘is’ a particular way, it does not follow that it ‘ought’ to be that way. This is, of course, an obvious point to make, and yet appeals to necessity as justifying the normative anaemia of pluralism are not uncommon. Robert Jackson (2000) appears particularly vulnerable on this point, given his highly conservative account of why it is that propositions such as humanitarian intervention are dangerous and must be resisted and that normative progress, where it is possible, arises from incremental changes in practice amongst the established and privileged holders of power, but in ways that do not challenge the basic framework of international society (these points are elaborated in Williams 2002). Therefore, whether we look to human nature, sociology or necessity, pluralism does indeed appear to come up short as a normative theory. What is really notable about this, though, is that the issue of the ethical diversity of human communities is almost absent, reduced to a matter of historical development and denied centrality by the failure of pluralism to develop appropriate philosophical or sociological roots. This, to my eye, is the fundamental lesson to draw from this assessment of pluralism’s portrayal as normatively deficient, even bankrupt. What ought to be central to the defence of pluralism on normative grounds—the desirability of the diversity of human communities—is reduced to an empirical observation and not subjected to any sustained theoretical examination, neither is it provided with remotely secure methodological and philosophical bases. The initial major claim that I wish to state in this book is that this is a serious, indeed catastrophic, mistake. With the exception of Barry Buzan (2004), there are no contemporary, and precious few historical, English school theorists who consistently assert the separability of explanatory and normative theory.3 Buzan argues that his separation is pragmatic, intended for the purposes of aiding analytical clarity and assisting in the reformulation of English school theory as a more rigorous and methodologically sound social-structural theory. He repeatedly defends

3 Arguably, amongst the classic English school writers, Bull gets closest, given the moral scepticism that characterizes his early work in particular and which is only somewhat mitigated in later pieces (Williams 2006, 2011).

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those who see the normative dimension as integral to English school theory and urges them to engage with his reformulation (Buzan 2004, 228–9; see Williams 2011, for such an engagement). It is a tenet of English school theorizing that empirical analysis of world politics goes hand in hand with normative assessment, yet traditional pluralism relies on an asserted, not demonstrated, presumption in favour of the priority of the empirical. Pluralist normative claims must stem from an empirically accurate statement of the facts of international relations, and normative claims otherwise rooted—for example in moral philosophy—are admissible only to the extent that their alternative bases are compatible with this empirical reality. In defending the normative character of pluralism I thus appear to be defending a position that is dying on its feet. The rest of this chapter establishes how this challenge might be overcome and why that is an endeavour worth undertaking. I propose to attempt this task in a number of steps. The first is to sketch what I want to defend as a more appropriate account of pluralism, in particular concentrating on seeing it as a normative position with deeper philosophical roots than are usually acknowledged in the traditional account. My focus here is on establishing pluralism as an ontological rather than empirical claim. That leads to the second step, which is to show how more philosophically sophisticated accounts of a pluralist ontology allow for pluralism to present a progressive normative agenda, in contrast to the conservatism with which it is usually charged. From there, the third step explores the importance of context to this account of progressive pluralism— it is a form of normative theory that makes few universal or ahistorical claims, and for the most part argues that normative theory takes place in the context of lived experience. Finally, I seek to assess the progressive claim made for pluralism, particularly explaining how it is that this is an immanent rather than necessary progressiveness: the charge of conservatism often levelled at pluralism is not necessarily wide of the mark, but it is a mistake, I suggest, to see it as unavoidably accurate.

Recharacterizing Pluralism Pluralism as a Philosophically Plausible Position The theoretical and philosophical neglect of the plurality of human communities in standard accounts of pluralism is both striking and crippling of its normative aspirations. The idea that pluralism is conservative, pessimistic, and unsustainable in the face of change is not a necessary feature of pluralism, even if it may be a reasonably accurate charge to level at some expositions of the position. Instead, this section seeks to establish that there are plausible and persuasive bases upon which pluralism can be rebuilt and that the core of 19

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this endeavour is a refocusing upon what ought to be at the heart of any pluralist case—the normative value of the diversity of human communities. In contrast to the historical and empirical bases of pluralism emphasized in the standard account, the task here is to emphasize the centrality and normative significance of diversity. Bringing about a situation whereby a progressive pluralism is rooted in a plausible philosophical account of the nature of human life would put it on as strong a basis as solidarism and a considerably stronger one than it enjoys at present. That would be a step in the right direction to restoring pluralism’s position within the English school tradition, offering a necessary corrective to the conservatism of the traditional account. Hannah Arendt offers the most interesting and, in my view, the strongest basis from which to establish the significance of plurality to the human condition. In The Human Condition (1958) and The Origins of Totalitarianism (1973a), Arendt presents a powerful defence of the ontological centrality of plurality to political life and the limitations of abstract accounts of universal human rights as a means of protecting people from oppression, violence, and, ultimately, mass extermination. Her thought has been hugely influential in a wide range of areas, and Arendt is a rich, complex, and, at times, frustrating thinker. Efforts to develop her political theory in ways that help explore international relations remain relatively limited in their extent, although in some cases rich in their insight (e.g. Klusmeyer 2005; Lang 2003; Owens 2007; Williams and Lang 2005). Within political theory more widely, authors such as Nancy Fraser (e.g. 1990) have done a great deal of work that develops Arendtian insights in ways that are useful to this project. Whilst in sociology, Gerard Delanty (2011) provides an account that is important for the argument here. What matters most about Arendt’s thought to this project is her commitment to the plural nature of human life. This is unambiguous: what defines us as human beings is our difference from one another (Arendt 1958, 8). That commitment results in a profound need for human beings to live life amongst other human beings in order to know themselves through sharing their lives with different others. Being able to locate oneself within a richly varied community where certain reference points, ideas, experiences, and concepts are shared, but shifting, is the way in which people come to understand who they are and how they fit into the world. Community also enables people to achieve their full potential by acting politically—putting themselves into a public, political space, and shaping their life and the lives of those with whom they share their existence through actions. Being within a meaningful community enables people to escape the worst features of human existence—what Arendt refers to as ‘loneliness’. To be ‘lonely’ is to live without the trustworthy company of fellow humans with whom to share a meaningful relationship based on common experience, both directly lived and inherited, and with 20

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whom to share normative aspirations for a common future (Arendt 1958, 188, 1973a, 477). To be able to ‘promise’—to make meaningful commitments about the future—and to ‘forgive’—to acknowledge, accept, and transcend our own and others’ past shortcomings—are ways in which people can establish islands of certainty about who and what they are through social relationships in otherwise often unpredictable circumstances. Arendt’s (1973a) famous analysis of totalitarianism, and especially of the Nazism she directly experienced, highlighted the deliberate and systematic creation of loneliness as the distinctive feature of totalitarian political programmes. She also, famously, stressed the uselessness of abstract, universal ideas such as rights in the face of totalitarian politics, describing them as instances of ‘hopeless idealism . . . or feeble-minded hypocrisy’ (1973a, 369; also Cotter 2005). People have to live in a community and draw on that resource if they are to have any chance of resisting the destruction of real politics that totalitarianism brings. Thus, the diversity of humanity is not just an empirical feature of world politics, or even a universal empirical feature of human politics in the sense that there has never been a single global culture and human beings have always lived, so far as we can tell, in groups and bands that have differentiated themselves from one another. It is, instead, a fundamental feature of world politics because it is a fundamental feature of being human in the same way that many solidarists, especially liberal ones, see possessing rights as being a fundamental feature of being human. As a result, an Arendtian account is normatively rich and capable of establishing powerful claims about the nature of the good that place plurality at the heart of a normative vision. A full-scale elaboration of Arendt’s political thought at this point would not only overload this chapter, but demand a book in itself (for the best available account with a focus on international relations see Owens 2007). However, this necessarily brief sketch is sufficient to highlight how traditional pluralism’s implicit assertion that diversity need only be understood as an empirical fact about the world systematically neglects the opportunity to take pluralism seriously as a philosophical, and particularly ontological, concept. An illustrative instance of how taking pluralism seriously can play out in understanding political life comes through Gerard Delanty’s (2011, 652) acknowledgment of Arendt’s insights into much modern political philosophy around political space. His account of cultural diversity emphasizes the centrality of cultural encounter to understanding diversity in a way that is particularly helpful to a revived pluralism that is inescapably interested in how diverse political communities interact, including how they create the institutional forms through which interaction is mediated. Delanty’s (2011, 634) summary of the problem is one that serves my purpose well because it

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highlights central features of the sociology and normative theory developed in this book: The [argument] is addressed to a problem that has become more acute in light of the extension of the link between culture and political community to contexts and issues that have become generally associated with globalization and more specifically with the rise of cosmopolitanism. On the one side, cultural diversity appears to be both a desirable normative aspiration and an inevitable outcome of worldwide democratization: on the other, cultural diversity can entail a conception of difference that may be a challenge to democracy if the latter is restricted in its assumptions about membership of political community or if the demands for the recognition of difference may be excessive or incompatible with other goals.

Encounter, contestation, dynamism, and the limits of consensus are themes that characterize Delanty’s account, underpinned by the inescapable necessity of engagement to building political action that is understood in relational terms. Pluralism is about encounter and the creation of relationships that enable institutional manifestation. Culture is not fixed or monolithic, as Delanty notes (2011, 638), ‘a conception of culture has gained currency that stresses its fragmented, plural and contested nature. This . . . offers an important corrective to the traditional conceptions . . . that posit a unitary and underlying subjectivity of which [culture] is the symbolic expression.’ Consequently, we must deal with culture as ‘fragmented, mobile and plural’ and ‘relational’ (Delanty 2011, 640). The Arendtian roots of Delanty’s sociology are clear in this summary and reinforce the claim that plurality as an ontological condition is of immense value to reviving English school pluralism. The English school virtues of methodological open-mindedness, historical sensitivity and ongoing engagement with the normative implications of human political action characterized by the interplay of competing political dynamics are reinforced by the adoption of an Arendtian perspective. In particular, placing plurality at the ontological heart of human life and politics and granting it normative significance as a result of that centrality begins to replace with philosophical substance the normatively null void of empirical claim typical of traditional pluralism. Nancy Fraser’s (1990) critique of singular representations of the public sphere also picks up on the fragmentation and mobility that Delanty highlights. In her influential critique of Habermas’ account of the bourgeois public sphere, Fraser draws on revisionist historiography to identify the continual presence of what she calls ‘counterpublics’ that create their own, distinct, public spheres that stand in conflict with the dominant, bourgeois form. Importantly, these counterpublics are not simply a reaction to the bourgeois public sphere, but are present throughout the emergence of public spheres in post-absolutist politics: ‘[N]ot only were there always a plurality of competing 22

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publics but the relations between bourgeois publics and other publics were always conflictual. From the beginning, counterpublics contested the exclusionary norms of the bourgeois public, elaborating alternative styles of political behaviour and alternative norms of public speech’ (Fraser 1990, 61). This enables Fraser (1990, 62) to question, ‘the assumption that the proliferation of a multiplicity of competing publics is necessarily a step away from, rather than toward, greater democracy, and that a single, comprehensive public sphere is always preferable to a nexus of multiple publics’. Fraser (1990, 66–7) goes on to argue that it is particularly important for subordinate groups suffering social inequality to be recognized as distinct ‘subaltern counterpublics’, where ‘counterdiscourse’ can take place against homogenizing, dominating discourse. For Fraser (1990, 67), this has a normative dimension—in stratified societies (and world politics is surely stratified in a dazzling variety of ways), ‘the proliferation of subaltern counterpublics means a widening of discursive contestation, and that is a good thing’. These insights not only chime closely with the claims that I want to develop, they are also, I suggest, reinforced by the technological, economic, and political acceleration of communication and interlinkage characteristic of the near quarter century since Fraser’s piece. Her argument is couched in terms that assume a public sphere that is linked to the sovereign authority and territorial limitation of a state, although she acknowledges this as being increasingly problematic, but beyond the scope of her article (Fraser 1990, 76). My argument is that a revived English school pluralism has to be alive to the multiplicity of geographies and communities that constitute contemporary political subjectivity. Counterpublics and the notion of the subaltern, in particular, will emerge in Chapter 4 as an important element of my normative claims, linked to a concept of resistance. However, they will be disconnected from assumptions about the state. This intellectual lineage is helpful in establishing why this book has relatively little to say about one of the best-known defences of pluralism in political theory: that offered by William E. Connolly (2005). This is despite some obvious ways in which Connolly’s approach shows similarities to my project here. For example, Connolly (2005, 68–92) also stresses the connection between a pluralist position and philosophical plausibility that will be repeated in this book: definitive philosophical resolution is unavailable, and we ought to move forward in a way that accepts the potential for insight and enlightenment from diverse sources. Similarly, Connolly is profoundly interested in the political implications of his pluralist project, although perhaps rather more within the state than my focus on international relations. However, Connolly’s intellectual influences—‘Augustine, Spinoza, William James, Henri Bergson, Gilles Deleuze, Leo Strauss, Talal Asad, Giorgio Agamben, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’ (2005, 10)—are rather different from 23

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those I have already identified and those who will feature in subsequent pages. That impacts not just on analytical perspective and backdrop—the more ‘IR’ nature of this work than Connolly’s—but also on the normative argument made. Connolly’s (2005, 38–68) position is that pluralism is not relativism, something I endorse and elaborate in Chapter 2, albeit in a rather different manner. However, Connolly’s argument, on my reading, is that normative standards and practices are more contextual than I will seek to suggest: that the practice and experience of deploying ethical standards and reaching judgement has to be contextual because such thought processes are necessarily contextual. They can only take place in a specific time and place, involving specific people. That reiterates the contrast Connolly draws with a Kantian ethical tradition (2005, 92) to which my argument is somewhat more open. As I shall argue in Chapter 2, it is possible to identify highly durable (if not immutable or transcendental) standards that can be applied in context, but that do—at least to some extent—transcend that context. Nevertheless, the sharp of hearing will pick up echoes of elements of Connolly’s thinking in the following pages, if not the same intellectual influences and reference points. That, though, is in tune with Connolly’s account and his emphasis on the diversity of intellectual trends and perspectives on lived reality that must be embraced—what he calls an ‘each-form’, rather than an ‘all-form’ encompassing the totality of reality (Connolly 2005, 94). There is not the space to extend this account of varieties of properly normative pluralisms further at this stage. The purpose of this section is not to suggest that these pluralist accounts are necessarily philosophically superior to the various ways in which solidarism is elaborated. Trying to decide definitively on the philosophical merits of traditions is a task that is unnecessary in order to contribute to normative debate. Instead, what I have aimed to show is that the account of pluralism in the English school given by Hurrell, for example, and which is widely accepted, is contestable. There are plausible, even persuasive, accounts of pluralism that actually focus on what ought to be at the core of pluralism as a normative project: not the role of a ‘Westphalian’ sovereign state in preserving a minimal order within a community of such states; but the value and normative potential of human plurality. The label ‘pluralism’ has been mistakenly attached to what is a secondary phenomenon in normative theorizing about international relations—the historical development and contemporary manifestation of a society of states—rather than the truly normatively significant question of the plurality of the human condition.

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Pluralism as a Progressive Normative Agenda Acceptance of the argument that standard accounts of pluralism badly neglect the crucial philosophical claim that ought to be at the heart of the project, and that this neglect generates the normative poverty associated with pluralism, does not necessarily produce a progressive normative agenda. That, of course, raises a question about what I mean by progressive. Here I see no especial reason to depart from the idea that seems to be inherent in the way the term is used by English school solidarists: that being progressive means being committed to bringing about a world in which human beings are better able to lead the sort of lives that they would freely choose to lead. Where pluralism differs from solidarism, however, is in there being no necessary commitment to the content of that progressive agenda in the sense of prescribing specific political practices and institutions as manifesting progress, such that, for example, the holding of a competitive election as a means of selecting political representatives is a good thing. Being progressive is about being able to identify trends and forms of political thought, practice, and institutions that are ethically indefensible and, above that minimum, to be able to explain and defend a preference for some trends and forms over others. The detailed elaboration of this claim is completed in Chapter 2, as it is a substantially epistemological claim. What is at stake here is how to overcome traditional pluralism’s apparent rejection of the possibility of progressive politics because of its purely empirical account of diversity. Hurrell’s (2007, 292) charge that pluralism is conservative, pessimistic, and unsustainable in the face of processes of global change is not automatically inaccurate. Some pluralists, such as Robert Jackson (2000), appear to me to be in exactly that sort of position and yet to offer a rigorous, and vigorous, defence of their position. As the previous section makes clear, this is because they miss the crucial element of the pluralist case: the depth of the claims that ought to be made about the significance of human plurality. There is, instead, an excessive concentration on the institutional manifestation of international society and a consequent neglect of its proper normative significance. Sovereignty, for example, is, indeed, as solidarists (e.g. Wheeler 2000) claim, contingent, but that contingency can be linked to the ability of sovereignty to effectively protect and promote human plurality as well as human uniformity. There is, therefore, a need to outline what enables a progressive pluralist case to be made and why it does not end up aping solidarism. The previous section identified a number of plausible propositions from which to derive a normative account of pluralism, and this section suggests that it is the Arendtian angles in particular that are most promising and not necessarily in tension with an alternative such as Connolly’s. What they share is a 25

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commitment to a participatory account of politics, and one in which the outcome of that participatory process is indeterminate. To be a human being is to be a political being and to be a political being is to have the opportunity for meaningful participation in shaping the environment and institutional context in which one lives. That is not just about voting rights or negative liberties, but about belonging, membership, and identity that create rich ties of authority and obligation that stem from more than power or law. And, most importantly, in contrast with pluralism as it is usually understood, they must start at the level of the individual. Creating the conditions whereby individual plurality can flourish within the context of community emerges as the key normative challenge for a reformulated pluralism. Agency, a key solidarist notion, is also a key pluralist one, too. However, it is less easily reduced to a notion of liberty that stresses individual freedom to choose subject to a general limit that such choices cannot reduce the equal liberty of all others to choose as well—I cannot be free by enslaving others. Instead, this notion of political agency stresses a sense of being truthful to oneself and to those others with whom one shares a political life. This is not judged against abstract, idealized standards, but instead against the shared values that arise from mutually respectful participation in a community. This process must be open-ended. The immanence of change within any community must be defended normatively, otherwise participation becomes ritualistic and apolitical—a going through the motions in the knowledge that the outcome is predetermined by a sclerotic structure that has come to reify a particular instantiation of power distributions. This, of course, is almost exactly the position within international society that traditional pluralism is charged with defending (Williams 2002), yet it is the antithesis of what a pluralist normative position ought to be about. Therefore, the potential for a pluralism built on claims about the centrality of diversity to human experience is present. It can also deliver a progressive agenda, one that is attuned to the ideas of liberty and agency in ways that are different from the liberal solidarism that claims the mantel of progressivism in the English school, but ways that are not masks for authoritarianism or oppression in the name of interstate order at (almost) any cost. It is, though, a contextual argument. Pluralism’s normative agenda is not one that can be presented in terms of universal prescriptions regarding the proper meaning of liberty, rights, justice, or sovereignty, because how different communities create and modify their responses to these ideas (and others) cannot be prescribed in advance as to do so is to deny agency and to challenge the centrality of pluralism to the way that we ought to live. Context is therefore normatively significant. It is not just the historical, sociological, and anthropological context within which the challenges of universal ideals have to be addressed. Context matters in a more profound 26

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way than this because it represents the sum to date of the participatory process that provides the backdrop of current deliberations. That prior political experience may not have been a ‘good’ one, in the sense of one that complies with the account of pluralist normativity I am aiming to elaborate here, and it may well have been violent, coercive, oppressive, and highly exclusionary. Awareness of the failures, immoralities, brutalities, and mistakes of a community’s shared past is an essential part of participation, but it remains the context within which participation occurs and there is, therefore, a need to understand the nature of that normativity in more detail.

The Normative Significance of Context For some, normative political theory is about the transcendence of context; about the identification of abstract ethical ideals that ought to apply in all places and at all times. Some of these may require the creation of new political forms—utopian states or societies in which these ideal values are manifest (Marxist workers’ utopias, for example); others may require that we live our lives according to certain universal principles, seeking to uphold them irrespective of the political context in which we find ourselves (some accounts of the Kantian categorical imperative, possibly). Perhaps the most influential in contemporary political philosophy—Rawlsianism (Rawls 1971)—is rooted in a thought experiment that is self-consciously about the absence of contextual information. What is important for a pluralist normative proposition, though, is that our notions of right and wrong, good and bad, cannot exist outside of the context in which people live and participate. Humans are constantly making and remaking normative standards, questioning current ones, proposing new ones, reaffirming old ones through the ways that they act, including through the ways that they define and punish transgression as well as reward virtue. This is not to reject out of hand the insights available from the profoundly important enquiries into the concept of justice available from those who have followed the trail laid by Rawls into the realm of international justice. Beitz (1999), Pogge (2002), and Caney (2005), to name three prominent figures in the global justice debate who have commented on, developed, critiqued, and extended the Rawlsian position to great effect, stand for many others who have influenced thinking and practice, especially in relation to distributive questions. Instead, the pluralist claim here is that the force of the better argument alone is insufficient to carry the day. The impact of this philosophical work is included in a pluralist approach because of its role in setting the terms of normative debate within political communities and ideas about what is owed to whom and why. That includes the effect of philosophical debate on 27

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academic contributors to community debates and the role they may have in government and other elements of the policy process. So far in this chapter I have treated community membership as though it were singular: each person is a member of a single community. That, of course, is one of the criticisms levelled at traditional pluralism: that it reifies a single community—the nation state—and ignores or underestimates the importance of the rise of subnational and transnational communities and identities. The revolution in communications and the increasing mobility of human populations mean that these multiple community memberships are becoming more and more important. Beyond this type of community there are also, and also increasingly important, identities linked to what is often called global civil society: individuals share with others membership of a community of trade unionists, environmental activists, bankers, anti-globalization campaigners, philatelists, and so on. Lists of this sort might also contain shared interests in drug or people trafficking, terrorism, and paedophilia, to emphasize the point that transnational connections and linkages are not automatically positive. Membership is, though, important to shaping individuals’ political identities and sense of normative value, because through participating with others in such communities their political subjectivity is constructed, their sense of belonging and obligation is altered, and their political perspective on when, how, and why to act is affected. Contexts are thus multiple, both in terms of the contexts within which we live our lives, but also in terms of the levels at which they operate and the activities which they shape. Neither, as already suggested, is this a linear process we should expect to lead teleologically towards a ‘better’ future. Consequently, pluralism in the sense elaborated here faces several significant difficulties in its understanding of context and the ways in which engagement takes place with different political projects and discourses that are manifest in different contexts. Some of these difficulties are fundamentally important, but as with so many fundamental questions about political life, they are stubbornly resistant to definitive resolution, and plausibility may be the best that can be hoped for from any supposed ‘answers’. Perhaps the obvious starting point here is the ontological character of context. Within the English school, and certainly within standard pluralist accounts, there is very little consideration of this question. Context is largely taken for granted as the accumulation, the ‘sedimentation’ in John Gerard Ruggie’s (1998, 873) apposite term, of prior historical practice that enables us to understand the distribution of power that informs actors’ understandings of their interests. Here, though, context must be something richer than this rather thin portrayal permits. Context has ontological standing within this modified account of pluralism because it serves as a summation of the collective experience of the community. It is not static—far from it—and it is not 28

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inherently or necessarily normatively progressive, but it is ontologically significant because of the way that it shapes the ontology of the individual members of the community and because of the way that it is imbued by those members with some sort of independent, collective existence. Context cannot be an ‘actor’ in the way that individuals are or even in the way that collective or corporate bodies can be (Erskine 2003), but it does have social reality for both those who are members and those who are not, and it is constituted within political life by certain identifiable rules, institutions, and processes that draw significance and meaning from their position within this context. This brief discussion cannot claim to resolve the outstanding questions about the ontological character of context, but it does make a case for taking this issue seriously, and not to see context in purely instrumental terms: as the backdrop against which interests are formulated and maximized, or which provides a representation of that which needs to be overcome. I will return to this issue in Chapter 2’s lengthier discussion of epistemological questions, which will elaborate on how and why context matters and the relationship between individuals and communities. Alongside the question of ontology come similarly fraught questions to do with the epistemological status of context. For some, the kind of knowledge and knowledge practices that are embodied in communal contexts are amongst the most important obstacles to normative progress. The claims to significance of the kinds of knowledge typically considered in normative debates about cultural context are certainly immensely complex questions. Some of the most familiar are to do with the standing of religious knowledge or why certain sorts of customs and practices should be regarded as binding, for example. I do not plan to explore those in any depth at this stage, although more is offered in Chapter 2 on the significance and value of religious knowledge and the role of custom in establishing epistemological standards. At this point in the argument, the epistemological questions that are more important relate to the meaning of truthfulness to a community. For most communities that draw on such knowledge sources, their epistemological status is a subject of intense, specific, and longstanding debate, rather than a matter of ostensibly universal philosophical standards. Consequently, the truth claims that a community makes about its self-understanding and its place in the world are importantly related to the moral truth claims that are also typically part of such knowledge systems. The ontology of a community is therefore connected not just to the epistemologies that inform the knowledge that community values, shares, and preserves, but also to the way that knowledge shapes understanding of the nature of the wider world within which that community exists and interacts with others. Membership of multiple communities means tensions in the accounts of the world that individuals hold and through which they understand what they owe to whom and why. Some of those 29

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tensions may be profound and irresolvable, at least in certain circumstances, whilst others may be marginal. However, a revived pluralism needs to accept the significance of this ontological tension, rather than seek to eradicate or marginalize it through reifying the sovereign state as being the preeminent and unitary ontological unit in international relations. This brief discussion marks a return to one of the identified potential bases for a properly pluralist normative account of international society, and Arendt’s version of political action through political discourse. This can, of course, also be harnessed to solidarism via the discourse ethics of Habermas, as championed in IR, and in relation to the English school in particular, by Andrew Linklater (1990, 1998). However, here the notion of being truthful to one’s community, and the dilemmas and tensions that arise from aiming to be truthful to multiple communities, offer a useful way of thinking about the complexity of normativity within pluralism, in stark contrast to the simplistic account offered in the traditional pluralist texts. For individuals to live meaningful lives requires, on this basis, the opportunity to have meaningful engagement with their fellow humans. That requires more than acceptance of a thin, shared, universal ‘humanity’, although that may be a start to an important relationship. Instead, it demands a shared set of reference points and a shared commitment to a properly political project. This opportunity to insert oneself into the political world created through living and talking together, what Arendt (1958) called the ‘space in-between’, is, inevitably, a normative activity. It necessarily involves ideas of promising and forgiveness that require having and sharing models of the good and the right and scripts through which departures from those can be mediated to find ways of reconciling ourselves with others. There is nothing in this position that inherently rules out the possibility of universal outcomes from such processes, but that is an empirically unlikely proposition. Instead, and more importantly, it does restore to pluralism a mechanism for thinking about how and why it is that different communities develop different notions of the right and the good and about how it is that different epistemological standards help account for the incommensurability of such positions. The contrast between theological and secular accounts of knowledge is one obvious instance of this, but whilst there are arch rationalists who wish to dismiss any knowledge claim tainted by religion (Richard Dawkins is the obvious example), what is striking about actual communities is their ability to work with and balance between both types of knowledge. The ontological account of individuality and community that characterizes actually existing communities does not demand a resolution of such epistemological debates. It would, indeed, be odd if they did, given the complexity of those questions and the role that diverse epistemologies play in communal life. This is not stress or cost free, of course, and the dynamics between those 30

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professing the primacy of the sacred and those for whom the rational carries most weight are played out in societies all over the world: from those seeking to find distinctive space for the ideas of aboriginal communities in North America and Australasia, for instance, to the tensions between ultra-orthodox and secular Jews in Israel, to the status of religious insignia in France. Neither are such debates and disputes confined to life within states, they exist at sub and transnational levels as well. Violence, intolerance, repression, authoritarianism, and cruelty can be the outcome of these debates. The ability of communities to augment, develop, adapt, and change their epistemological standards and their normative ideals is genuinely striking. The abandonment by a near totality of the world’s communities of practices such as slavery is not just the result of Western imperialism or imposition, but the result of discourse, debate, and reinterpretation of the normative standards of communities, including their sacred texts in some cases—witness historical Church support for slavery in the Christian world. The reduction of coercion, especially direct physical coercion, and the opportunity for dissent and a questioning of a community’s notions of truth point us towards what I want to argue in Chapter 2 are the key standards for assessing the normative potential of a community: inclusiveness and dynamism. These opportunities exist in a vast array of locations, from globalizing corporations, to battlefields, to ecumenical seminars, to functional bureaucracies, to global summits and their attendant protests, and to the practices and processes of familiar political struggles for control of the organs of state power and authority. Pluralism is not a narrowly statist purview on international society and it has the potential to offer a normative perspective that is as far reaching as solidarism, with appropriate groundwork put in place.

The Progressive Claim for Pluralism The progressive claim for pluralism is, therefore, a limited one. A more pluralist world is not necessarily a more progressive world. Critics of English school pluralism’s normative vision are right about that, at least. However, where they are wrong is to assume that a progressive normative vision is simply impossible. It is possible, and, indeed, it must be possible once the role of human diversity and the need for individuals to belong are restored to their proper place at the heart of pluralism. Where diversity is emphasized in traditional pluralism, for example through the role of nationalism, it is done so in a way that is excessively statist, static, and, curiously, ahistorical, in the sense that historical identities are tied to the development of state forms. This restricted, even seemingly immutable, palate of communities to which individuals can validly belong is, as has already been 31

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emphasized, a key weakness in conventional pluralism because it perversely denies the plurality of human identity and the dynamism of human community. The undeniable empirical reality of multiple community memberships and identities, the tensions, opportunities, costs, and benefits that this brings and their normative potential are all present, yet denied in conventional pluralism. A progressive case is therefore immanent, and it is focused around the dynamism that solidarists claim for themselves but which ought instead to be seen as a crucial pluralist claim. Human identity, community, and belonging are undeniably highly dynamic and malleable. Indeed, the possibility of change, the permissibility of dissent, and the recognition of the irreducible need to belong are at the heart of pluralism’s normative case. Those political forms that either deny the possibility of permissible change or which seek to deny access and participation to all but a select elite are as morally abhorrent to the pluralist as they are to anyone else. They cannot represent a legitimate expression of a political community because they deny the possibility of community, of belonging, of participation. Justifications for highly exclusionary practices and the necessity of retaining established systems, mechanisms, and processes in order to protect interstate order or the privileges of sovereignty do not hold water for a revived pluralism. That, I suggest, is a significant shift from the traditional position. Mutual respect and toleration are meaningful only within communal groups on this account, establishing important normative limits to the oppressive, authoritarian, and exclusionary tendencies of all communities. The progressive claim of pluralism is not prescriptive in its outcome, in the way that many solidarist accounts indebted to natural law and natural rights have to be because of their assumptions about universality. That is not to deny that the liberal commitment to individual rights and the fundamental dignity of the sovereign individual is not a hugely positive restraint on fundamentalist accounts of community that deny change and stifle dissent. What it is to argue for is recognition that progressive change within communities can come in a variety of forms that are not limited to the gradual extension of the zone of liberal politics predicated on an acceptance of cosmopolitan claims about human moral agency derived from abstract logics. The way in which such arguments and claims are incorporated within the beliefs, practices, and values of communities will vary. Or they may be seen as only partially compatible with other, deeply held, community principles, such as those often associated with conservative religious discourse. The working out of those tensions is also affected by wider dynamics in which community members are engaged through the multiplicity of communal memberships that all people hold. It is not a straightforward process with predictable outcomes—beyond, perhaps, the predictability of dilemmas, uncomfortable 32

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compromises, and ongoing instability in a community’s particular and temporary resolution. The reciprocity that characterizes pluralism is therefore reciprocity of belonging: people need to belong, and to belong to a variety of communities. It is also a reciprocity of appreciation for the struggles that belonging brings, both within any particular community over what it means to participate, to be truthful, to contribute; and also where the different demands of our multiple memberships conflict. These are genuine moral dilemmas. How human beings react to, struggle with, reconcile, or prioritize one set of demands over another is a crucial aspect of most of the key normative challenges faced by human beings and human societies in world politics. Accounts of normativity that are monopolized by a single perspective offer greater certainty in how we should respond to these dilemmas, but they are, I argue, less human than a pluralism that appreciates that there is a host of good answers that can be offered by people depending on their communal perspective and few easy ways to identify which one ought to trump the others. Understanding those viewpoints, recognizing their normative force, engaging with them but ultimately facing the need to decide, the need to act, the need to be political is not something to underestimate. Believing in and committing to ethical perspectives is something that people have to do, as pluralists have long argued, but it is also something that can be progressive because it tells us more about who we are via how we belong, and teaches us about how others belong and how that contributes to their sense of themselves through fulfilling their need for membership in a community. Identity, subjectivity, political practice, and institutions ought not to be fixed and, where efforts are made to fix them, these should be seen as normatively inappropriate—as wrong.

Conclusions: Pluralism and the Analysis of International Relations Pluralism can, does, and should offer a progressive normative agenda. However, this relies on refocusing on what is truly plural about pluralism, rather than on the aspects stressed by Hurrell, for example, to produce his brutal conclusion about the lack of a future for the pluralist wing of the English school. Hurrell’s critique is not just a normative one, though; he is also sounding the death knell of pluralism as an analytical framework incapable of explaining the increasingly dominant patterns of politics that are not dependent on traditionally conceived sovereign states. My focus is on the normative, offering an account of pluralism that detaches it from a narrowly conceived, statist international society. This also has the potential to reinvigorate pluralism’s analytical potential in a way that 33

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is open to the changing patterns of world politics. In particular, the shift away from an automatic assumption about the centrality of states, no matter how appropriate that may have been for 200 years, is on its own a significant step in the right direction, analytically. The greater openness of a revived pluralism to different geographical scales, locations, and framings of political membership and activity brings with it analytical benefits, as well as normative ones. A revived pluralism’s normative agenda must also tie in with analytical insight, because of the way that, as with all English school theory, it rejects artificially strict divisions between the analytical and the normative. Hurrell (2007), curiously, neglects Buzan’s (2004) far-reaching and impressive effort at reformulating English school theory in a way that enhances its analytical power by opening it to a much wider range of social, political, and economic actors and introducing significantly reformulated terminology to better enable the English school to engage with a full range of historically existing political structures and potential emerging future ones. The power of Hurrell’s renewed account of order in world politics suffers, I believe, as a result. His normative defence of a growing solidarism is tied to a set of analytical claims that reflect the English school’s virtue of synthesizing empirical and normative analysis, yet does not draw on the most extensive and persuasive analytical reworking of English school categories presently available to us. That analytical reformulation certainly appears at first sight to offer an approach in which the ideas discussed here may find a potential partner. Buzan’s schema is certainly a radical one. His account of the limitations of the traditional pluralist-solidarist debate and his very extensive reworking of the idea of world society, such that it becomes focused on the transnational and the interhuman dimensions of global politics, is a welcome corrective to the usual characterization of world society. From my particular perspective, it is useful for the challenge it mounts to an assumed solidarist hard wiring of world society (Buzan 2004; Williams 2005). Whilst this book is not a companion piece to Buzan’s (2004) in the sense of self-consciously aping its structure or system, there is a background sense in which the challenge Buzan set is being answered here, although in a way that also aims to demonstrate how an approach to English school theory that focuses on the normative creates some substantial challenges to the dominant analytical perspective Buzan adopts and the reasons for looking at world politics from an uncritical, privileged perspective. Exploring that potential further is beyond the scope of this chapter, it is picked up in Chapter 4 in particular, but it does point to an additional research agenda for those interested in maintaining and reviving pluralism within English school theory. Certainly an alliance between the analytical insight and flexibility offered by Buzan and a revived normative agenda committed to engagement with the dynamics of diverse communities has considerable 34

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initial appeal (for a more detailed defence of this position see Williams 2011). Pluralism needs to retain its analytical purchase on world politics whilst renewing its normative agenda and vocabulary if it is to remain a part of an English school project that insists on the connection between the analytical and the normative in its efforts to understand crucial aspects of world history, world present, and world futures. This chapter has suggested how reformulating a pluralist ontology plays a critical role in that process by establishing the centrality of plurality as an essential feature of the human condition. Indebtedness to an Arendtian account of plurality and of politics is at the core of that ontology, and this chapter has looked at the implications of that account for reformulating pluralist claims away from an empirical point—that people disagree about ethical issues, and this has to be managed politically—to a normative one— that such a situation is ethically desirable. The nature of pluralist politics has also been elaborated, establishing community as central to a revived pluralism, and highlighting multiple community membership as an inescapable feature of human life, and one whereby technology is transforming the reach, scope, and nature of such memberships. Chapter 2 looks to develop these principally ontological observations by turning to the epistemological dimension of the philosophical reformulation of English school pluralism. Knowledge claims are critical to pluralist ethics and the way in which those claims are formulated, framed, debated, and amended is a vital part of understanding how ethical standards are set, judgements reached, and change initiated. That will also help me to elaborate more fully the claims about progressiveness in a revived pluralism by showing how it is that sclerosis and exclusion mark the limits of ethical defensibility and that communities marked by dynamism and inclusion are normatively preferable. The forms of such dynamism and inclusion are, however, wide ranging.

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2 Beyond Moral Scepticism, Statism, and Conservatism: Recasting Pluralist Approaches to International Society

Introduction The purpose of this chapter is to further re-examine some of the foundations upon which the pluralist case within the English school has traditionally been built and which have been found increasingly wanting over the last two decades. In particular, the focus of this chapter is on epistemological issues, considering the role of different knowledge types in the development of a revived, pluralist ethic. Hurrell (2007, 292) sees pluralism as a lost cause in the face of the changing structures, patterns, practices, and institutions of contemporary global politics and, most importantly, the normative challenges that result. Hurrell’s (2007, 25–56) portrayal of pluralism is essentially focused on the existence, operation, and preservation of a society of sovereign states in which the shared goal of minimal order and the avoidance of unrestrained violence through shared practices and beliefs is the core proposition. This yields a conservative normative position premised on the preservation of the limited scope of international order amongst states that has been attained to date. That requires the repression of non-state actors and the insulation of the society of states from wider political changes and challenges so as to protect the central role of sovereign states in the management of international politics, especially by the more powerful states. This reflects both the distinctive challenges of politics in the absence of overarching authority and the impossibility, or at least extreme unlikelihood, of accepted universal propositions emerging that would enable international society to place the wellbeing (commonly understood) of human beings at the heart of politics. This portrayal of pluralism is the ‘textbook’ account. However, as argued above, rather than sovereignty and the society of states being the defining

Beyond Moral Scepticism, Statism, and Conservatism

feature of a pluralist account, it is the ethical and normative diversity of human communities that should define the pluralist account of international society. Further, this chapter sets out one aspect of how it is that this plurality of human life can be seen as pregnant with significant normative potential, such that pluralism stands as a valid, viable, and, indeed, progressive normative position within the English school. It can be read in the context of Molly Cochran’s (2009, 203–11, 221–2) appeal for the English school to re-engage with the philosophy, and particularly the epistemology, of international ethics, an activity she suggests has been absent for almost fifty years. Cochran (2009, 222) highlights how the English school’s normative potential goes well beyond the pursuit of orderly coexistence amongst states. It is not just an empirical truism that we live in a world in which different communities have different ethical schemas, instead the claim is that we ought to live in such a world. That the world is characterized by diverse human social systems with different normative positions arising from different understandings of a whole range of ethical questions, including fundamental questions such as the moral agency of human beings, is a normatively desirable state of affairs. The ethical homogenization of human life is not something that should be seen as necessarily more desirable than the persistence of plurality. There are, however, limits to that plurality. There are propositions made about the way people ought to live that are inadmissible and must be resisted. There is an epistemological dimension to the debate that is inescapable, and which demands a degree of engagement with philosophical considerations of how to judge between competing knowledge claims. As discussed in Chapter 1, however, those epistemological considerations do not take place in the abstract. Debates over what knowledge counts in ethical judgements about political questions reflect the history and experience of the community within which the debate takes place and which establishes the criteria against which judgement must be reached. The ontological character of plurality, indebted to an Arendtian approach to politics, means that ethical knowledge is political because to choose is to act, and to act is to be political. Substantiating and elaborating that claim is a political argument, in two senses. First, it is a political argument because I am interested in politics, even a specific manifestation of politics, international relations. Therefore, very general claims about knowledge are not made in this chapter, because politics is about particular types of questions, to do with control over distribution and participation, for example, and invokes a specific sort of knowledge claims. Second, it is political because, as already noted, I want to re-establish the pluralist position in the context of wider debates about a political theoretical school of thought: English school IR theory. As such, I am engaged in seeking to promote the claims of one approach against another in how we understand and assess political behaviour and that, in itself, is a 37

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political activity. This is an exercise in advocacy, not in ostensibly detached and impartial description or analysis, should such things be possible in this context, which, along with Hedley Bull (1977, xv), I very much doubt. There are three principal topics I aim to tackle in thinking about pluralism within the English school in the course of this chapter. The first is to specify a little more carefully than possible in Chapter 1 why I see pluralism as being in such a parlous state insofar as its normative persuasiveness is concerned, suggesting this has methodological roots in a favouring of historical and comparative analysis indebted to empiricism that results in a neutered normative capability. This is at odds with wider methodological moves in the English school over the past fifteen years and precludes effective engagement with the normative dimension of communal diversity. Correcting this requires a focus on theories of knowledge as an important topic in this context and, more specifically, why I think it is an important topic in relation to the meaning and normative standing of the diversity of human communities. There is nothing necessarily original or insightful in suggesting that communities are, in important respects, communities of knowledge and belief (e.g. Anderson 2006), but I do want to show that this is neglected by pluralists, who typically tend to see communities in different ways, most importantly as empirical historical phenomena. Second, I explore how it is that focusing more precisely on the role of knowledge in community identifies different types of knowledge that are involved in the creation, maintenance, and sustainability of community and why it is that this also puts specific normative questions at the heart of communal and intercommunal relationships. In particular, it highlights the issue of judgements about the quality of knowledge. Third, the chapter will address the political elements of knowledge more directly, and in particular the ways in which different types of knowledge and knowledge claims are mediated. That will require consideration of the role of power, not simply in the sense of coercive force, but more widely in the ways in which social structures, institutions, and processes privilege certain forms of knowledge and certain mechanisms in the evaluation of competing knowledge claims in ways that significantly affect our understanding of normative questions. These moves aim to tighten up considerably the methodological and epistemological basis for a revived pluralism, focusing in particular on the ways in which normative claims are made, advanced, debated, contested, and mediated. This adds some flesh to the somewhat bare bones described in Chapter 1, showing how it is that arguments drawn from Arendt, Delanty, and Fraser are adopted and adapted to this task.

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Pluralism, Methodology, and Normative Failure Recent discussions of the methodology of the English school (Navari 2009a, 2009b) have made far clearer the diversity of methods and methodologies involved in English school research and the extent to which, despite its supposed lack of methodological sophistication, the English school has shown a consistent interest in the ways in which we can, and should, think about the study of IR. That has, for the most part, reconfirmed a distrust of positivist ‘social science’ focused on formal causal explanation understood in terms of dependent and independent variables, where predictive power is a key test of ‘good’ theory (Navari 2009b; also Buzan 2004, 34). Nevertheless, whilst emphasizing an approach more indebted to historical and comparativist approaches, interpretivism and a generally sociological bent, these accounts are more concerned with exploring the nature of the reality of international society and only partially with expressly normative approaches (Navari 2009a). The principal exception to this downplaying of the normative opens with a paean to the English school’s ‘wearing lightly’ its methodology and a confession of authorial reluctance to engage in explicit methodological reasoning (Mayall 2009, 209). As such, there remains a gap in pluralist normative thinking about how and why the diversity that pluralists wish to stress in international society should be approached and how it can be seen in a positive normative light. In this chapter I make a case that an epistemological turn is one that pluralists should take, although that observation may be more generally valid in the English school (Cochran 2009, 222). To reiterate further, this discussion is intended to focus on the idea of diverse political communities, and whilst that is not by any stretch of the imagination a hermetically sealed category (‘the personal is the political’, for instance, to cite one of the classic slogans of feminist political theory and practice), I will concentrate here on certain common concepts and practices that are often seen as central to political life and, in particular, those that are important to a pluralist account of the English school and to the reformulation that I am attempting. For the last fifteen years there has been a steady move within the English school towards an emphasis on social constructivism as offering the most plausible methodological basis for examining its key theoretical offering— the idea of ‘international society’ (e.g. Buzan 2004; Dunne 1995; Reus-Smit 2009). There are other methodological positions in play, most obviously the idea of a ‘classical method’ defended most strongly by Hedley Bull in the late 1960s and then, over thirty years later, by Robert Jackson (Bull 1966; Jackson 2000, 44–76). As Navari (2009a, also Cochran 2009, 211–19) has elaborated, ‘classicism’ is a label that covers a number of philosophical positions, including an empiricist reluctance to admit philosophical argument about foundations, 39

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and is unified by its commitment to the purpose of studying, rather than by any particular philosophical position. Also prominent is a commitment to methodological pluralism, such that, as Richard Little (2000) has argued, different elements of the English school project can be best explored using different methodological techniques, ranging from ostensibly objective structural analysis through to self-consciously ‘critical’ theories. What appears to hold this methodological diversity together, creating strengths and weaknesses, is the centrality of social practice to international relations.1 Mechanistic, structural accounts of social behaviour are marginalized. Instead, exploring and comparing different patterns of social interaction amongst different socially constructed corporate agents and institutions is in the foreground. Actors, structures, institutions, rules, law, and norms are all in flux because of their social character and thus our methods of enquiry need to be attuned to the social reality that we seek to study. That leads some, such as Manning or Jackson, in an anthropological direction, indebted to participant observation’s stress on seeing the world through the eyes of practitioners (Navari 2009a, 7, 2009b, 42). Others develop comparativist methods enabling historical explorations of the meaning different societies attach to notions such as order, hegemony, war, power, diplomacy, or law. From there analysis can move to how that meaning affected the constitution of an international society of states as a purposive organization focused upon shared social consensus in the pursuit, if not always the attainment, of common goals (e.g. Navari 2009a; Watson 1992). Some of these social practices can be very local, others extremely general, especially in their normative aspirations—those elements of the rules, norms, and principles of behaviour that we share which look to prescribe and proscribe future conduct and which provide the basis for debate about the shortcomings of existing social arrangements. Typically, the English school focuses on the general because of its goals of understanding not just politics amongst states, but global politics in the sense that states create an international society and that, since the onset of ‘third wave’ decolonization after World War 2, that society has been a global one (e.g. Bull and Watson 1984). For pluralists such as Bull, Watson, and Jackson, that process has served to insulate international society from substate developments, such that one of the challenges facing decision makers is the occasional need to stand firm against the parochial demands of the national community in the name of the greater good of international society. Philosophical distrust of universalist

1 The ‘practice turn’ in international relations is a topic of substantial debate (e.g. Neumann 2002; Hopf 2010) and whilst this discussion is not intended to make a specific contribution to that debate, I do draw in part on some of the themes that it has engaged.

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aspirations for ‘local’ normative proclivities combines with an emphasis on the observed consensus amongst state leaders in defence of a norm like non-intervention to establish a strong bias in favour of the preservation of existing rules deemed conducive to the attainment of order (Cochran 2009, 216–19). Of course, traditional English school pluralism has a concern with particular types of social structures—political communities—and especially those political communities that successfully establish their claims to sovereignty and become states. In theory, although not so often in practice, pluralists should be interested in a far wider range of political communities than just those that form states. This is the potential that I seek to explore not just because of the sociological significance of community but also, and principally, because of the normative significance of community to the lives, as they are really lived, of individuals. In many self-consciously normative accounts of the English school, there is an assumption that it is the solidarist strand, with its commitment to a ‘world society’ supposedly predicated on human solidarity (Bull 1977, 276–81) that has special access to individuals. That is something that I seek to contest here: there is no reason at all why pluralists should not defend their normative position on the basis of an appeal to individuals and that they have not done so up to now is a serious shortcoming. The descriptive and comparativist focus engendered by the methodological choices typically favoured by pluralists have served to sideline normative assessment of the basic claims made about the social reality pluralism aims to study. Normative argument has focused only on the outcome of this diversity—the society of states. The move I want to explore in pursuit of this claim is how normative judgement demands investigation of the knowledge practices that constitute community. This has a number of facets that need to be addressed: how knowledge practices help establish the normative constitution of community itself; the complexity of the normative environment that individuals face through their membership of multiple communities; and the basis on which we can engage in comparative and historical normative judgements about communities. I agree with Cochran (2009, 219–22) that thinking about types of knowledge, and types of knowledge claims, involved in pluralist accounts of community offers potential insight into the normative poverty of traditional pluralist analysis and into the normative potential of a revived pluralism. It is the knowledge that we possess about language (as an important political identifier, rather than in the sense in which theorists of linguistics might understand the idea), territory, culture (again, as political identifier), history, class, faith (and specifically its relationship to politics, rather than necessarily its metaphysical claims—or lack of them), fate (in the sense of an idea of 41

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shared destiny), and even blood that is likely to be important. That list is not intended to be exhaustive or authoritative in terms of how we see political community being constituted—the lack of the usual references to scholarly discussions of each of these concepts is indicative of its status. It is, I think, a reasonable reflection of the elements that make up, to varying degrees, a great many political communities. However, I do not think there is anything in principle that would preclude the addition of further concepts to the list or that would preclude the analysis I offer being applicable to a community that drew on knowledge and knowledge practices that were outside of this list. It does not particularly matter to the points I hope to make whether this list is seen as a ‘good’ one or not, unless it were to be rejected as totally wide of the mark in identifying concepts that are important to politics. Assuming that this list, or something reasonably similar, is accepted, it is apparent that conceptual knowledge plays a crucial role in the creation, transmission, and maintenance of community. It is also important to those who understand themselves as being outside of that community, because they reject the content of these concepts in preference for others that mark them out as members of a different community. There are also debates within all communities, of course, about the proper mix of these features and whether or not some are necessarily more important than others. How significant a particular religious faith, or even just religious faith in principle, is to political community is one example, with debates over the status of Christianity in the European Union and consequent assessment of the acceptability of Turkish membership being one of very many possible illustrative examples.2 It is possible to ask a great wealth of questions about political concepts such as these, including boundary questions about why these are understood to be ‘political’, whereas other concepts are not, or at least not as widely. Nancy Fraser (1990, 67) does exactly this with her concept of ‘subaltern counterpublics’, which exist to challenge the marginalization of certain issues—Fraser’s (1990, 71) example is domestic violence—as being non-political, because they are, in this instance, ostensibly a ‘private’ matter. The already mentioned claim that ‘the personal is political’ is apposite here, of course, because of the way that those, most successfully feminists, who have challenged the idea of a public–private divide and the associated notion of the apolitical character of the private realm, have sought to highlight how what is and what is not ‘political’ is itself a political issue, and that the personal is also the international (e.g. Enloe 1990, 195). This points to one of the key political issues surrounding knowledge: the ability to authoritatively rule on what is and what is not ‘political’ knowledge

2

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I am grateful to Hamish Leese for this point.

Beyond Moral Scepticism, Statism, and Conservatism

and the social and normative consequences that flow from those decisions and the practices that underpin them. Identifying the social practices that surround the authoritative determination of epistemology—social epistemology— can take place in a descriptive and analytical mode (Buchanan 2002, 2009). Questions are asked about who has authority in this realm, why they have that authority, and what the consequences are of this particular disposition of authority. Analysis may also ask comparative questions about how these practices differ from similar practices in comparable communities and historical questions about how and why such practices change over time. That may lead towards normative questions arising as well: are present practices better than previous ones? Are the practices of one community superior to those of another? How ought such practices to change, perhaps in order to bring them into closer compliance with a universal ideal? Pluralists are interested in these kinds of questions, and there is extensive discussion within the English school of how practices have changed over time and at different locations (e.g. Buzan and Little 2000; Mayall 1990). Comparative analysis of claims made by different communities about central political questions to do with the distribution of power and the scope of participation as elements of constitutional orders has been used to highlight how it is that the character of the state as an authoritative political form has evolved and changed in response to changing political circumstances, including the roles of law and strategy (e.g. Bobbitt 2003). How ideas such as ‘sovereignty’, which is typically understood as an authority claim, have changed is one example of this, and one that is important to pluralism’s case (Jackson 1996, 2007). This is intimately linked to the rise of nationalism as the most important form of political identity and the associated acceptance of doctrines such as national self-determination, sovereign equality, and non-intervention (Mayall 1990). However, pluralists have tended to treat the comparative aspects of these changing practices in an overwhelmingly descriptive way. This has supported interesting and insightful analysis of what has changed over time in relation to, for example, sovereignty and its historical transformations. The normative assessment of these changes has been neglected with the exception of how such changes have affected the ability of international society to maintain orderly coexistence amongst states within an international society (Jackson 1996, 2000; Mayall 1990). Even here there is a generally unexamined, if not implausible, assumption that a stronger society of states is more desirable than a weaker one and that developments in understandings of political community that promote the strengthening of international society are preferable (Williams 2006). So, for example, the account of a solidarist or ‘Grotian’ international society originates with the idea that it is characterized by the strengthening of a consensus amongst states in favour of the enforcement of international law (Bull 2000). 43

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The politics of knowledge within states has not been subject to such normative analysis. The standard that is applied to whether changes in political knowledge practices are to be welcomed or feared has been the standard of whether it makes a state more or less likely to comply with the existing institutions of order in international society, not whether or not they enable individuals to lead ‘better’ lives.3 This is a significant shortcoming in pluralism because it misses the normative importance of one of the descriptive strengths that pluralism ought to claim: an abiding and serious interest in the diversity of human political communities. Instead, the standard becomes the straightforwardly utilitarian one of whether or not a particular political community defined by a constellation of social practices rooted in knowledge claims does or does not make a positive contribution to the maintenance of order. Here order is understood in a very limited fashion that more or less automatically loads the dice against any nonstate actors and in favour of existing authority structures within states. The diversity that is allowed for is thus remarkably narrow, given that pluralists are keen to stress how important diversity is to understanding the political situation. These are key aspects of Hurrell’s (2007, 292–8) critique of pluralism, for example, and its inability to adequately address current and future conditions of global politics. Pluralism therefore needs to engage far more thoroughly with how certain knowledge and knowledge practices are constitutive of community and why it is that these are important to human diversity. That is a massive agenda, of course, that I broach in a very specific fashion in order to initiate an epistemological enquiry that picks up the more ‘maximal’ conception of ethics that Cochran (2009, 205–11) sees in Donald Mackinnon’s and Desmond Williams’ contributions to the initial work of the British Committee on the Theory of International Politics, a path identified but not explored by subsequent English school theorists. There is a need to concentrate on the political aspects of this knowledge and on the dynamic political processes which shape knowledge about and within communities, including knowledge constitutive of what that community means. This mode of enquiry is more amenable to the empiricist proclivities of traditional pluralism, but that approach is insufficient, I argue, without the addition of a philosophical position that supports stronger normative claims than mere empirical regularity or consensus permits. In particular, there is a necessity to understand how it is that we are able to reach meaningful judgement about different knowledge forms and

3 See Cochran (2009, 207) on Donald Mackinnon’s distrust of the utilitarian logic in his contributions to the early work of the British Committee on the Theory of International Politics that played such a significant role in the development of what we now know as the English school. On the Committee’s history and work, see Dunne (1998) and Vigezzi (2005).

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practices within different communities, whilst retaining the comparative and historical strengths of pluralism. Far more normatively sophisticated analysis is needed in order to ask questions that go beyond the narrow utilitarian ones of maximizing order; instead looking into how knowledge constitutes society and how to interrogate different knowledge practices in ways that both allow critical judgement to take place and which take seriously the ethical bases of plurality. Having outlined the extent and nature of the problem and suggested where insights may be found, it is necessary to look in more detail at the specific sorts of questions involved, and that takes me to the different types of knowledge claims that are entangled in this debate.

Different Knowledge Types One of the most important and interesting aspects of the debates about the normative standing of plurality within the English school is the importance of different types of knowledge to the ethical significance attached to different sorts of community and, especially, to the task of differentiating them as to their normative power. Traditional pluralism stands accused of ducking this question, because of the way that it emphasizes the diversity of answers that communities have generated to basic ethical questions, in order to arrive at the conclusion that there are no accepted or sustainable grounds for providing universal answers. Thus, in that absence, we cannot rate one set of communally specific ethical propositions to be ‘better’ or ‘worse’ than another and, therefore, aiming to change those practices, especially through coercion, is inappropriate (e.g. Bull 1965, 20–1, 1983, 11–13). This is treated as a matter of fact. The philosophy that underpins this claim is little explored because it is not regarded as important (Cochran 2009, 211, 213–14). Furthermore, as such coercive change is detrimental to the dominant understanding of sovereignty and its corollary of non-intervention, these actions are damaging to the normative standard we can identify as existing amongst states—that of the preservation of order through coexistence on the basis of shared and statist rules, norms, and principles. Not interfering in ethical standards operating within states is a key part of that agreement. The philosophical basis of the validity of this second normative claim in the absence of any properly defended basis for making the first (about the impossibility of intercommunal normative judgement) is not terribly clear. This position is unsatisfactory. It fails to answer any serious questions about why the knowledge claims of different communities are acceptable, other than through the clearly circular logic that they are the knowledge claims of that community. It raises a descriptive, empirical claim—different communities 45

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have different and incompatible knowledge systems and claims—into a normative proposition—it is impossible to philosophically, comparatively, or historically assess the relative qualities of these claims with a view to knowing what ought to be done when they conflict. There is a need to think a little more about the types of knowledge claims that are made and the nature of their normative force in order to get a better sense of how a pluralist position can be more effectively proposed. Effective proposition is here understood as linked to the claim that plurality is a normatively desirable, and not just an empirical feature of human life. There is a great variety of ways to approach this topic. Analysis could start with some fundamental epistemological questions about the status of knowledge in social situations. This can raise a number of important issues before even arriving at the content of that knowledge, such as how to understand the relationship between knowledge and truth, for example, and whether there is a significant difference between knowledge and opinion (e.g. Goldman 1999, 7–40). Those kinds of philosophical questions are set to one side here, however. I am taking it as plausible that there are valid grounds for admitting the reality of social knowledge and the role that it plays in shaping the way that people locate themselves within the world and the institutions and processes through which they engage with the world. Whether this knowledge is an accurate reflection of demonstrable empirical realities is certainly an interesting philosophical problem. However, its contribution to political analysis is likely to be marginal. That people believe different things about reality and that those different beliefs are important to how they act would seem, at the risk of initiating an irresolvable regression, to be an accurate reflection of reality, or at least of political reality. Some may decry this state of affairs—it is regrettable that people persist in believing empirical falsehoods about the world—but in an English school spirit of engaging with the world as it is, I will have to work with the consequences of this epistemological imperfection. Pluralists, especially those wanting to defend the normative value of plurality, have to emphasize social forms of knowledge. This is not to deny the potential importance of ideas about ‘natural’ or ‘absolute’ knowledge, such as might be claimed in relation to the physical world, although here too, of course, there are debates about how far the ‘truth’ about the natural world can be known (e.g. Meillassoux 2008). For the time being, however, I propose setting that to one side as well. The key issue in the pluralist case surrounds social knowledge—knowledge that arises out of and feeds back into social processes and contexts that build, sustain, and evolve communities, aiding them in fulfilling their aims, however the society defines those aims and however it prioritizes different aims. In relation to political communities, those aims are many and varied, although not infinitely so. Questions of authority, membership, survival, 46

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participation, and resource distribution are likely to be common—something of an expansion on Lasswell’s famous dictum that politics is about who gets what, when, and how, to include standard IR concerns with security. The forms of knowledge that are involved are equally disparate, but also not infinitely so. However, I want to suggest a preliminary taxonomy of three types of knowledge that are important to the normative dimension of community in particular. Let me stress that this does not arise from philosophical claims about the distinctiveness of these types of knowledge. Instead it stems from reflection upon how pluralists approach the comparative and historical study of international society and the bases they see for emphasizing the importance of diversity to international relations. These three are: first, ‘transcendental’ forms of knowledge; i.e. those forms that claim some sort of eternal and/or objective validity. Second, ‘narrative’ forms of knowledge; i.e. those that claim to constitute a story about the community and its place in the world, including its past, present, and future. And third, ‘pragmatic’ knowledge that addresses the political challenges of power and how it is that the community’s identity shapes the range of available appropriate responses to the ‘realities’ of power distribution and the challenges which it faces at a particular time. Traditional pluralists typically stress these types of knowledge. Bull (1966, 361) identifies ‘philosophy, history and law’, for example, although what he turns out to mean by law can be brought within my category of ‘pragmatic’ knowledge. Pluralist accounts of community usually stress the entanglement of these types of knowledge, they do not aim to separate them out and subject them to analysis. Instead, it is the description of the historical process of their entanglement that is discussed, seeing in this ways to identify and explain communal differences via their different understandings of truth, their different interpretations of their historical experiences in shaping the community, and their different locations within international power distributions. That, however, leaves how thinking about knowledge enables identification of why plurality ought to be valued insufficiently discussed. These three categories are not hermetically sealed. However, blurring of the boundaries serves a useful purpose from the perspective of the current project. ‘Transcendental’ knowledge enables us to explore pluralism’s understanding of a community’s relationship to ‘truth’; ‘narrative’ knowledge pluralism’s understanding of a community’s relationship to ‘history’; and ‘pragmatic’ knowledge pluralism’s understanding of a community’s approach to ‘power’ and meeting present, immediate demands, including in its relations with other communities. Choices that have evolved in relation to each category are likely to have implications for the others, so the dynamic interplay between truth, narrative, and power will emerge as significant.

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As I hope to show, this already fairly complex picture becomes more complex once it is admitted that almost all individuals are likely to be members of multiple political communities and that this requires a conception of politics that extends well beyond the ‘inter-state’, to include the ‘trans-national’ and ‘inter-human’ dimensions of global politics, to borrow labels developed by Barry Buzan (2004) in his reformulation of English school theory. The assumption of the near absolute privileging of the state in traditional pluralism is rightly seen as unsustainable (Hurrell 2007, 292). For the moment, however, I wish to flesh out this knowledge taxonomy a little further and to advance claims about how it helps me grapple with the normative value of community and to appreciate the complexity of that normative value and its inescapable entanglements with normative dilemmas.

‘Transcendental’ Knowledge The notion of ‘transcendental’ knowledge typically raises the idea of religious forms of knowledge, although there are other, secular-scientific, bases for claiming access to truths about the world, including the absence of any sort of divine being whatsoever. The truth of mathematics, for instance, may stand as a secular basis for knowing things in an absolute way (Meillassoux 2008). The particular political challenge of transcendental knowledge is the claim of access to highly privileged information about how the world is and, particularly characteristic of religious knowledge, how the world should be. There is a powerful normative element in religious, especially theistic, belief and this underpins the importance usually attached to such knowledge forms in pluralism. Because of the claim to especial insight into the will of God (or gods) claimed by religion, departures from prescribed practices or rejection of a divinely ordained normative vision become heretical, and potentially punishable. Equally, amendment of those practices or that vision is unacceptable: one cannot negotiate over the will of God, especially with those who wish to reject a community’s claims to particular insight into this special form of knowledge and set another set of claims in its place. On this view, ecumenism is doomed to failure, if the standard of success is reconciliation of the world’s faiths, or even unification within those that share certain common origins, such as the Abrahamic monotheistic traditions. Add in pantheism, animism, and other faith forms and the task is overwhelming. Areas where ecumenical dialogue can aim for success are establishing bases for less hostile relations via identifying common elements in belief and practice, expanding mutual understanding in the hope of relieving tension, avoiding conflict through misunderstanding, and creating protocols for interfaith discussion on issues of common concern or on major challenges affecting communities. It sounds not too far from the classical pluralists’ hope for an 48

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international society focused upon coexistence and the avoidance of general, violent conflict. It may be for this reason that religion is so prominent in accounts of international politics that stress the conflictual consequences of irreconcilable truth claims (e.g. Huntington 1996). Of course, not all religious knowledge takes this form and there is a massive variety of ways of holding religious faith and using such knowledge as a way of gaining access to understanding the world. For some, ascetics, for example, the purpose of religious activity is to withdraw from the wider world and to pursue a spiritual journey that demands closing oneself off as far as possible from the sorts of social, political, and economic concerns that threaten to pollute the spiritual quest for redemption, enlightenment, or truth. At the other end of the spectrum, there are those who may abuse notions of religious authority and obligation to that authority in order to grant licence to forms of political activity that many within the faith deplore as political, worldly abuses. What matters in this, as far as pluralism is concerned, is the way that it creates seemingly irresolvable debates about fundamental questions that underpin political life, indeed all life. It feeds the notion, common in pluralism, that peaceful coexistence on the basis of an agreement to disagree about such matters and to engage in mutual restraint is the appropriate response to communities divided by such debates over ‘truth’ (e.g. Jackson 2000). For some, perhaps most, pluralists within the English school, notably Bull, this is spiced by a healthy dose of scepticism about the possibility of any such truth being accessible to the human mind, and thus a distrust of the motives and rectitude of those making such a claim (e.g. Bull 1979a; Cochran 2009; Jeffery 2008). This position is not one only held by English school pluralists. Some argue it is characteristic of pretty much all thinking influenced by post-Kantian philosophy in the Western world (Meillassoux 2008, 28–49). Claims to be able to access knowledge of things in themselves, unmediated by human thought or human experience, are the kinds of epistemological claims that give rise to deep-rooted ontological and metaphysical problems about the nature of existence and our ability to know of that existence with any degree of objectivity and certainty. The correlationist approach to philosophy that sees only a possibility of knowing things ‘through’ and ‘for’ ourselves and therefore never ‘in’ themselves results in a rejection of absolute knowledge, even the possibility of the thinkability of absolute knowledge, that may, paradoxically, result in scepticism about truth that re-establishes the plausibility of religion. If there can be no access to metaphysical knowledge and all such claims are dogmatic ones, rather than demonstrable ones, then the standing of all truth claims is ultimately rejected and, thus, there is no fundamental, philosophical reason for preferring one form of knowledge to another (Meillassoux 2008, 1–49, especially 43–9). 49

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In a social and political world where certainty is a frequent demand and where individuals in society need a sense of location, belonging, and identity, the critical destruction of truth places all such knowledge claims in the category of acts of faith. For those seeking certainty, religion offers that certainty, especially for those who prefer highly literal interpretations of their chosen sacred texts. But for pluralists in the English school, this line of philosophical enquiry is a turn not taken. They accept the post-Kantian notion of the critical unknowability of truth and see in this, instead of a rehabilitation of religiosity, only grounds for the rejection of metaphysical debate about the superiority of one social schema over another. Rather than philosophical investigation, they regard diplomatic investigation as providing appropriate evidence for the knowledge that matters. The consequences for normative theory are seen, however, in the way that competing truth claims are understood solely for their political effects. The counterproductive and counterintuitive consequences of pluralism’s philosophy—the rehabilitation of religious knowledge—is ignored as social and political analysis develops that sees in these questions only a philosophical black hole in which the quest for the status of knowledge appears to be an unpromising sideline or dead end, turning us away from the main highway of enquiry into how people live, day to day, with the consequences of these epistemological complexities. What people think does not really matter very much, because it is immune to useful enquiry, it is what people do that counts because it has observable, analysable consequences. This distrust of the religious turn results, however, in a remarkably static reading of the epistemological status of transcendental knowledge, passing up an opportunity to think more deeply about the normative consequences of plural accounts of ‘truth’. The persistence of this blinkered position is remarkable, and regrettable. There may not be a need for resolving fundamental philosophical debates in epistemology, although claims to restore the possibility of absolute knowledge of things in themselves may well be of interest. Instead, for a political account, it is more important to appreciate how ideas about ‘truth’, particularly of the transcendental variety associated with religion, play into an account of diversity that sees it as a normatively desirable aspect of human life. That normative element demands, by simple force of logic, the possibility of change, unless and until we can agree that we live in the best of all possible worlds and normative accounts are rendered redundant. In this claim there lies an echo of Connolly’s (2005) account of pluralism, mentioned in Chapter 1, as an important alternative to the position sketched here that draws on a different set of intellectual influences. Amongst those, Connolly cites William James and discusses his arguments in favour of a ‘multiverse’ as opposed to a ‘universe’, in which an ‘all-form’ rather than ‘each-form’ is able to encompass the totality of reality (Connolly 2005, 50

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68–92). Connolly deploys James’ thought to similar ends as I pursue here: the recognition of the importance of transcendental knowledge claims, but the implausibility of their resolution into a single account of ‘truth’. As I shall argue below, all knowledge systems require mechanisms for their renewal and reform, and transcendental knowledge is no different, although there may still be pause for thought about the quality of those mechanisms. Structures of canon law within Christianity, the immense weight of Islamic legal scholarship and the power of mathematical theory are obvious examples of how it is that knowledge is neither immutable nor even apolitical within this framework. Power and authority are at stake in these debates. Pluralists are wrong to see their empiricism as a reason to reject epistemology because the philosophical bases of diverse truth claims are inescapably implicated in how and why knowledge and knowledge practices change, and the normative consequences of that change are fundamental to that community. Gaining access to that world is crucial for making political sense of it and for reaching reasonable and plausible normative judgements. The possibility of change within knowledge claims about the truth, including the moral truth, of the world, the extent of plausible change, and the intellectual processes through which change takes place may be unsatisfactory to secularists (e.g. Buchanan 2002). There are legions of examples of sclerotic, dogmatic, fundamentalist, and empirically wrong teachings to set as evidence on this side of the scales; but change is normally immanent. Even those wishing to shut down lines of past enquiry or to reverse what they see as unjustifiable innovations in belief or practice are asking for change, in the same way in which those seeking the reversal of past political decisions or who appeal to the need to remain true to a cultural heritage they believe despoiled are asking for change. Diverse truth claims are not an excuse to abandon normative enquiry, even if they open a philosophical can of slippery, complex, and difficult to resolve worms.

Narrative That hint at conservatism brings me to the idea of narrative and its importance to community. It is common amongst many forms of political community to explain self-understanding and their ‘place in the world’ as born of a shared past that has forged a particular character and has established certain historical touchstones that provide lessons of great enduring significance. Delanty (2011), cited in Chapter 1 as a helpful source of methodological insight for this project, picks up on narrative. He stresses how, ‘narratives are a way of experiencing and interpreting time and situating the present in relation to the past and future . . . [N]arratives reflect the cognitive conception of culture as a form of mapping, claim-making and sense-making’ (Delanty 51

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2011, 640). Sometimes, of course, there are transcendental, typically religious, elements to this narrative—‘chosen peoples’, most strongly—highlighting that the categories of knowledge are not hermetically sealed. Narrative accounts typically provide traditional pluralists with further reasons for stressing the irreconcilable nature of community and further entrench the descriptive approach to diversity. Nationalism has been immensely important in creating national stories that stress difference, separation, distinctiveness, and the notion of an ingrained separation from, and frequently enmity with, other nations (Mayall 1990). It is tempting, if perhaps trite, to appeal to the imaginary (Anderson 2006) nature of these stories and to express a desire that the great commonality of humanity can overcome the comparatively ‘trivial’ differences that the nationalists wish to foist upon us. However, the narrative of separation retains immense political power, and narratives are a form of knowledge that has become deeply embedded in the political life of almost everyone. Who we are, what we are, where we come from, how we should act in these circumstances, what ought the future to hold for us, and so on are all political questions which attract narrative answers. The sociology that tends to underpin these traditional pluralist accounts has been the subject of a great deal of criticism. For example, Seyla Benhabib (2002, 4–5) portrays as epistemologically faulty and ‘reductionist’ three claims that are familiar in traditional pluralism: 1. Cultures are clearly delineable wholes. 2. Cultures are congruent with population groups and that a non-controversial description of the culture of a human group is possible. 3. Even if cultures and groups do not stand in one-to-one correspondence, even if there is more than one culture within a human group and more than one group that may possess the same cultural traits, this poses no important problems for politics or policy. Benhabib (2002, 5) goes on to note the centrality of narrative to a superior epistemology of culture: ‘Participants in the culture . . . experience their traditions, stories, rituals and symbols, tools, and material living conditions through shared, albeit contested and contestable, narrative accounts.’ The idea of narrative is more than the rather obvious notion that different communities tell different stories about their pasts, presents, and futures. It is also an important analytical device that helps thinking about some of the key challenges of any pluralist account of international relations: the relative degree of agency that communities possess, the idea of communities as corporate agents, and how that agency relates to the agency of human individuals. This is important for both analytical and normative reasons, although the latter shall be the main object of attention here. Analytically, narrative is 52

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crucial to knowing how different communities understand the basis of their own formation, how individuals relate to the whole, and why certain attributes, behaviours, and institutions are valued over others. ‘Narrativity of the self ’, to borrow Benhabib’s (2002, 15) phrase, emphasizes the necessity of thinking about agency in narrative terms, and that a community’s narrative is dynamic and interdependent with the narratives of others at a range of scales. This helps thinking about the notion of change and the social dynamics that underpin an account of change within a community. It also helps analysis of how and why communities engage with other communities that they encounter and the extent to which they perceive themselves as having choices in what they do in those interactions. These kinds of analytical challenges are always presented in the form of narratives: ‘individuality as the unique and fragile achievement of selves in weaving together conflicting narratives and allegiances into a unique life history’ (Benhabib 2002, 16). As Will Bain (2009) has persuasively argued, key English school figures typically use history in problematic ways in order to attempt to gain insight into the past as a mechanism for understanding the present. He (2009, 149–50) sees Bull as an exemplar of this sort of approach—studying the past for its ability to inform knowledge about the present and speculation about the future. Bain’s (2009, 152–4) discussion of Butterfield in particular highlights how it is that his account of history relies upon a historiography that attempts to separate, ultimately unsuccessfully, a kind of ‘contemporary’ history—that sees in the past direct lessons for present and future conduct— from an ‘academic’ history that is able to penetrate to the detached, impartial, and unbiased truth of the past. As Bain elegantly argues, these approaches to history are problematic. His (2009, 154–62) invocation of Oakeshott offers a more philosophically sophisticated account of the nature of historical knowledge, and one that has parallels with the idea of narrative being deployed here. It may also help to feed the concerns of those who see pluralism as a conservative doctrine, given that Mayall (2009, 209–13) offers Hume and especially Burke as originators of his normative position and we are now adding Oakeshott. Nevertheless, Bain’s account highlights the implausibility of history as truth or history as a source of insight into the future, because of the impossibility of complete and impartial knowledge of the past. Instead, we must know the past through the present, we cannot know what we do not know or recover a past on the basis of what is unavoidably an incomplete record that has to be interpreted through the lens of our own present and our own knowledge. Bain (2009, 154–9) describes an approach indebted to Oakeshott as ‘history as fable’ where, ‘historical fact . . . is an achievement of present experience that is qualified and articulated in terms of a past which no longer exists’ (Bain 2009, 156).

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The idea of ‘fable’ clearly connects with the notion of narrative being deployed here. Narratives about a community’s past may be presented as ‘true’ stories or ‘lessons of history’ that must be kept in mind if the community is not to repeat the mistakes of its forebears. But what is also true, of course, is that different communities have different fables and narratives. They read their histories differently, even where those histories are intimately entangled with other communities. Sometimes this is a self-serving portrayal of a heroic past or a catalogue of previous failure to justify current courses of action— Butterfield’s disparaged ‘contemporary’ history. But, as Bain shows, the English school’s approach to history and the use of narrative cannot avoid this kind of lesson learning. That is true, presumably, for all those who seek to understand international relations, at least in part, through the past. ‘Our’ epistemological approach to the evidence of the past will cause ‘us’ to see different histories, to learn different lessons, to tell different stories because ‘we’ unavoidably view the past, present, and future from different narrative viewpoints embedded in the present. Normatively, these narratives or fables are crucial because they explain what is to be valued from the past, in the present, and into the future. What kinds of values and goals should a community pursue? How do they fit into the community’s narrative of its own evolution and identity? How does its story fit with those of other communities with which it comes into contact? How do individuals mediate the different narratives of the multiple communities they belong to? What does that say about the likely basis for relations between communities? These kinds of questions are inherently normative—they invoke the idea of how things ought to be—and they are profoundly shaped by narrative accounts. Sometimes those accounts, as for communities of faith most obviously, relate to conditions of truth where a community narrative is marked by a commitment to fulfilling the commands of God. As Hidemi Suganami (1999) has argued, narrative is an exceptionally durable mode of representing knowledge that is important to understanding a whole host of questions, including fundamental political issues. Challenging the dichotomous presentation of agency and structure, and of ‘explaining’ and ‘understanding’ political events, Suganami’s (1999) use of narrative highlights the way in which thinking about politics in this way helps us to appreciate the limitations of those dichotomies. Whilst Suganami’s position is clearly different from Bain’s Oakeshott-derived critique of English school history, they share a view of the centrality of narrative to the presentation of politics. In particular they highlight the unavoidability of narrative in framing present and future political choices, invoking the normative significance of narrative because of the way that ideas about what ought to be done in the face of the present—how the future ought to be—invoke a narrative that is specific to the community. 54

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Anthony Lang (2013) has applied the notion of narrative to just such a fundamental political issue: the question of authority; and within the context of perhaps the classic issue of international relations: war. This reflects some of the main claims made here about narrative, with Lang (2013, 137) arguing that, ‘Rather than truth, meaning is the goal of narrative.’ He is well aware of the potential dangers of narratives about war—that they become selfjustificatory, nationalistic, or jingoistic—but Lang argues that the narrative form, as opposed to the rule-based formulation typical of just war theory, offers substantial advantages as a way to render moral judgement in enabling active public engagement in critical debates over the use of force. This reflects his acknowledgement of the inescapable role narrative plays in community and, as with the argument here, the role of Arendt (Lang 2013, 142–7) in developing thinking along these lines. This grants useful insight into the problems addressed here, because it highlights how central seemingly commonplace notions like narrative are to political life. Community narratives provide the backdrop against which political choices appear possible and dilemmas are constructed, and not just in relation to war and peace. They explain how communities understand the circumstances and environment within which they live through accounts of the past and ideals for the future. This in turn shapes what is understood to be politically possible and politically appropriate, a judgement that is inherently normative. Logics of consequences give way to logics of appropriateness (Olson 1965), or, more precisely, the notion of a clear distinction between these two modes of political reasoning blurs when we comprehend political action through the notion of narrative. What maximizes utility can only be properly understood by accounting for the context within which those judgements are made, including the implications for communal social structures and associated normative schemes. There may be immediate benefits available from pursuing a course of action that is morally odious within a community, but that does not make it politically acceptable if it is seen as infringing on deeply held normative ideas of appropriate behaviour, as the post-9/11 debate over torture suggests (e.g. Bellamy 2006; Steinhoff 2007; Sussman 2005). Conformity with a community’s narrative is an important aspect of political life because it offers normative purchase on political action. ‘Acting’ politically is seen by a theorist like Hannah Arendt (1958) as the highest manifestation of human agency. People are at their most human when they act politically, and that has to take place in the context of community. People are, as a fundamental tenet of humanity, plural—we are all different and that difference is the only universal feature of humanity. However, human plurality is manifested in the context of community through the potential of human actions to bring about change.

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Arendt (1958, 247) deploys the intriguing concept of ‘natality’ to highlight the potential for change that is present in every human birth. That change can only come about through collective action. Arendt’s (1972, 143) definition of power famously stresses collective action. Individuals can only act collectively in the company of people with whom they share identity and a sense of common purpose that draws upon a common well of beliefs, understandings, and knowledge of where they have come from, what ties them together, and what is their collective, common purpose. That does not mean a national community. Community can take a diversity of forms and political action in this sense occurs in a variety of different contexts. They are, though, characterized by the sense of shared endeavour and an openness to change and innovation that resists dogmatism and centralization. Arendt’s (1973b) famous contrasting of the fate of the US and French revolutions rests on this point in important ways. Narrative is crucial to that familiarity through shared purpose and common goals. Its destruction, the wrenching of people out of a circumstance in which they can have trust in their fellow political agents, is crucial to Arendt’s (1973a) account of totalitarianism, and what marks it out from previous forms of repressive, violent, authoritarian politics. The creation of the condition of ‘loneliness’—a life without the possibility of the trusting companionship of fellow members of community and thus the end of the potential for properly political action—is the defining, and terrifying, outcome of a totalitarian project. As discussed in Chapter 1, Arendt argued that universal, abstract claims to things such as rights are worthless in the face of such totalitarian projects (see also Cotter 2005). How people ‘tell the story’ of their community is thus much more philosophically important than pluralism traditionally allows. Arendt’s account of the status of community is philosophically more sophisticated, politically more insightful, and vastly normatively richer than anything to be found in the pluralism of the English school. She gives us a basis for seeing pluralism as being about individuals, not just about ‘nations’ and other collectives, because she offers an account of how community is essential for meaningful politics and how meaningful politics is at the heart of the moral standing of human beings. That their standing is predicated upon a fundamental claim about plurality, rather than the uniformity of human rights or utilitarianism, for example, further enhances the potential that her philosophy and political theory hold. Pluralism thus becomes about much more than descriptive comparative history. Telling the story of community is a normative act because it demands that the story has a continuation, perhaps even an idea of an ending. That continuation—even that putative ending—is normative because it demands thinking about what ought to be done: to assess competing courses of action 56

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and competing visions of a future, and to open them up to public political assessment and debate through political action. People have to insert themselves, through their words and deeds, into the ‘space in-between’, that location where people reveal themselves as humans to their fellow community members and seek their participation in a vision of the political future of their community (Arendt 1958). This is not a practice confined to the setting of the ‘official’ political arena: far from it. Arendt (1958, 28–50) was scathing about the effort to treat politics as though it were about plans and blueprints of future societies, whose execution was to be entrusted to exclusive, professional cadres of politicians. Politics as ‘craft’ was not politics at all, because it denied participation and aimed to impose regularity and predictability upon inherently unpredictable human action. Politics, properly understood, could be found in a whole host of areas of activity, although not in those characterized by violence, the antithesis of politics properly understood. Arendt, in her lifetime, was thus deeply sceptical about the potential for international relations as interstate relations to produce real political action because of its domination by the issue of war, through the fight against totalitarianism and especially Nazism, and the subsequent centrality of nuclear deterrence to the Cold War. However, her pessimism was excessive and certainly the politics of the post-Cold War era offers openings for political thinking and action, in this Arendtian sense, that is both indicative of the enduring appeal of her vision of politics and of the normative potential for a pluralism that sees the plurality of human life and the centrality of community membership(s) to manifesting that life (Owens 2007; Williams and Lang 2005). The narratives of community thus become far more than the mechanisms for identifying political fault lines and an empirical basis for minimizing the normative potential of community. The traditional pluralist account implicitly sees narrative as accounting for the futility of a cosmopolitan political-philosophical project and identifying irresolvable rifts that divide communities from one another and create the special circumstances of international society. Such an account is now open to normative challenge. The narrative of community is, in part, about division, difference, and separation; but it is also about the nature of being human; the common, shared, and universal plurality of individuals that finds its political manifestation through membership. That creates a universality—the universality of pluralism—that is of great normative significance and potential. It certainly offers a far more normatively potent account of the narrative of community than anything in traditional pluralist thinking.

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‘Pragmatism’ The challenges of political leadership and the need to take hard decisions, often under intense pressure and scrutiny, and in short periods of time, is a fact of political life. The ‘realities’ of power and the need for ‘tough’ decisions are platitudes that, as may often be the case, disguise a distinctive and valuable notion. There is certainly a commitment to this proposition in traditional pluralism, where Mayall has argued that ‘practical reason’ offers the framework within which normative theorizing in the English school should take place. This idea of ‘practical reason’ is one that Mayall (2009, 212–13) explores in a rather limited way (compare with Brown 2012), but it does indeed offer the potential to connect pluralism to richer and more extensive discussions of the idea of practical reason and its relationship to political action and that subset of practical reason, practical ethics, that offers direct connection to normative theory. One area where Mayall’s (2009, 211–13) account is lacking is that he conflates practical reason with an approach to history heavily indebted to a particular reading of Edmund Burke. This results in Mayall restricting the admissible forms of reason to those that are rooted in previously existing social consensus. That inevitably limits the scope for normative critique because it marginalizes radical critique that, by necessity, lies outside of that consensus. Mayall’s assertion of the normative limits of cosmopolitan ethics in international relations relies heavily on their not being a part of the established consensus of the society of states, and thus lacking normative purchase on the practical conduct of politics as it really takes place (see also Cochran 2009, 213–19 on the importance of consensus in English school ethics). Efforts to upset that consensus, even where there may be good normative reasons for supporting principles such as universal human rights, are unlikely to succeed as a result and may also be dangerous should they disturb the consensus in ways that are open to abuse. Mayall thus offers an account of sovereignty, democracy, and intervention in the post-Cold War era that concludes with an appeal to prudence and circumspection in efforts to change international society in ways that would grant greater weight to democracy and intervention (Mayall 2009, 214–26). Mayall’s account is almost entirely uncritical about the status of the knowledge that we have about the conduct of international politics. He offers a few words on the epistemological basis of his empiricist preferences and assertions about their centrality to any English school account (Mayall 2009, 210–12). Yet these accounts of history, historiography, epistemology, and methodology are highly contestable and rest on little more than blithe assertions of the appropriateness of these bases for normative theorizing that are clearly insufficient. 58

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For another traditional pluralist, Robert Jackson (2000, 2009), the pressures of high political office in particular create a special epistemological environment in which balancing the needs of office against personal convictions creates a need to understand the demands of the ‘role’ of statesperson. This is what underpins his (2009) claim that international relations is a ‘craft discipline’: it exists to enable non-practitioners to better understand those who practise this craft and to provide a basis for scholarship to inform practice. Diplomacy, balance of power, war, and law all bring highly specialized vocabularies, patterns of practice, and notions of proper behaviour, adding to the sense of the specialization necessary to operate effectively in international society. Jackson’s account, too, is indebted to the notions of practical reason and practical ethics. Contextualized forms of analysis are therefore central, but both Mayall and Jackson, in their effort to accommodate the ‘realities’ of politics, the imperatives of power, and the responsibilities of leadership neglect that abstract, radical, critical, and other approaches to these issues are a part of that reality. Contestation about knowledge and valid responses to political circumstance do not begin and end with the occupiers of established positions of authority. There is a need to appreciate and recognize the political and epistemological advantages that such positions bring, but they do not negate the power of critique. It may be that critique from the basis of normative principle underestimates the ability of established social structures to ‘push back’ and resist the force of what is accepted as better argument. That, though, is not a good reason to reject the validity or point of such critique. Allen Buchanan, for example, makes the point about the ‘push back’ by established structures in his analysis of why ‘applied ethics’, an approach with connections to the ‘practical reason’ asserted by Mayall, has sometimes struggled to effectively account for the durability of ethically indefensible practices (Buchanan 2002, 126–33). The prominence of ‘critical’ and ‘radical’ strands within the academic study of international relations are also indicative of the dissatisfaction with the plausibility of these arguments about necessarily closed and specialized knowledge forms as a necessary and desirable aspect of the conduct of international politics. There is also the classic critical theoretical claim that those who are the victims of epistemic power structures possess particular insight into those structures. This is often connected to the historiography of the subaltern studies movement, and associated postcolonial theoretical movements (e.g. Guha and Spivak 1988) with their indebtedness to Gramscian Marxism and, later, post-structural philosophical moves. The issue of the subaltern, resistance, and history is something I shall return to in Chapter 4, but it is worth emphasizing here that the ‘practical knowledge’ and, by extension, the ‘practical ethics’, to which traditional pluralism appeals is the practical knowledge and ethics of a very specific, typically highly privileged, and far from impartial social strata. 59

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This consideration of the issues surrounding knowledge within pluralism has pointed to the need for more detailed and sophisticated analysis extending into philosophical accounts of epistemology. What I aim to have established is that a defence of pluralism as a normative position necessarily has to address some profound methodological and theoretical limitations in the existing account. Thinking much more clearly about the types of knowledge that pluralism emphasizes, the relationships between those types of knowledge and the wider epistemological framework within which it locates its preferred forms of knowledge is part of that project. The normative significance of an insufficiently rigorous account of these epistemological questions contributes to the hamstringing of pluralism as a plausible normative position and emphasizes how it is that a more fully worked out account of the normative importance of ethical diversity has to dig far deeper into the normativity of plurality and the epistemology of diversity. That project remains a political one, rather than a philosophical one, however, and pluralism’s emphasis on practical, contextual, and applied modes of reasoning reminds us that this approach to normative theory must remain connected with, but not subservient to, political discourse within and between communities. It must also remain connected with the normative dilemmas that this approach recognizes. The normative importance of community, the plurality that community partially manifests, the multiple community memberships that individuals have, and the distinctiveness of ‘second-order’ communities amongst corporate political agents invariably and inevitably produces normative contestation. Easy resolution is rarely possible, doing what is right rarely a clear choice. Under those conditions, politics matters and it matters normatively because the decisions that are made, how they are made, the actions taken and not taken, and the treatment of dissent contribute to the ongoing discourse about our pasts, presents, and futures.

Knowledge and Politics The use of knowledge as a means of inclusion and exclusion, of the manifestation of power, is a familiar argument from post-structuralism, of course, but English school pluralists do not typically use it in this fashion. As poststructuralists have long argued, the denial of the epistemological validity of competing viewpoints is a very powerful political tool to be able to wield to protect established patterns of activity and associated privilege.4 My concern here is more with the notion of a neutered normative capability within 4 The key intellectual resource here is, of course, Michel Foucault. His impact on international relations is hard to overestimate because of the way in which his analysis of the role of language in

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pluralism, whereby the limits of what can be thought and said mean that efforts to challenge deeply rooted injustices are dismissed as ‘unrealistic’ or ‘fanciful’ in the face of the ‘realities’ of a fragile international system. The trajectory of the concept of the responsibility to protect, from its manifestation in the eponymous 2001 report by the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS 2001) to its adoption by the 2005 UN World Summit (UN 2005) and subsequent ‘clarifications’ by Secretary General Ban Ki Moon (e.g. Ban 2008, 2009) is indicative of the transfiguration of radical potential into conservative reaffirmation of the status quo. Arguably, the principle of national self-determination followed an almost identical path during decolonization (e.g. Hannum 1990). The methodological moves in the English school over the last fifteen years have typically served to cement normativity in the school’s work. A more self-consciously ‘constructivist’ methodology places values at the centre of enquiry and thus demands an assessment of the character of those values, including comparative and historical analysis of their development (Buzan 2004; Cochran 2009, 221; Williams 2011). It also demands an acceptance of the dynamic nature of social structures and consequent political patterns. International relations is not the arena of recurrence and repetition, as Martin Wight (1966) so famously argued, and even ostensibly similar practices can have different political meanings depending on the value systems against which they are set. The politics of this dynamism is normatively laden, too, and pluralism’s recognition and acceptance of the normative significance of plurality has to be politically astute and politically critical, in the sense that there must be mechanisms for assessing the processes and outcomes of knowledge dynamics, not just reporting them. Where pluralists have a potentially key advantage is in an emphasis on process and, as I aim to show, a comparatively weak commitment to the content of outcomes. What emerges as normatively crucial is the concept of toleration in relation to the essential plurality of humanity, but within limits that define and proscribe the intolerable (Williams 2002). The resources for this project are largely present within the English school, so what is proposed here is not necessarily a radical rewriting of the categories, concepts, and taxonomies that have developed over the last fifty years. The wide applicability of the proposal here is the result of the focus upon social processes in the political and normative debates around knowledge, with only the commitment to toleration and opposition to intolerance providing the prescriptive normative core of pluralism. the construction of power structures offers such powerful insights into discourse. Classic early uses of Foucault in IR, and ones that continue to resonate, are Walker (1992) and Campbell (1992).

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The English school’s identification and analysis of institutions as dynamic social practices is typically focused on the institutions of international society, and institutions have emerged as a key research focus in English school theory in recent years (e.g. Buzan 2004, 161–204; Schouenborg 2011; Wilson 2012). These institutions are also connected to the political institutions of the communities that participate, directly and indirectly, in international society. The fate of dynasticism, colonialism, and mercantilism, for example, indicates how the interaction of ‘domestic’ and ‘international’ politics is mutually constitutive. The rise of globalism highlights the declining relevance of the domestic/international distinction. The role of knowledge within these institutions is fundamental and the prominence of normative concepts such as legitimacy, frequently focused on the dynamic mechanisms through which practices and institutions gain and lose their positions of prominence, highlight how it is that this is not a static position (e.g. Clark 2005). Analysis of the ‘life cycle’ of norms further entrenches the necessity of an analytical and normative approach capable of responding to change (Finnemore and Sikkink 1998). As Buzan’s (2004) analytically focused rewriting of the English school emphasizes, this is not a neat picture. Different dynamics analysed as operating at different scales and to varying extents produce a messy picture in which such dynamics only very rarely, if ever, line up and point in the same direction. There are frequently competing positions producing opposing dynamics dragging political practice in incompatible directions. The texts of international agreements are often notable, for example, for their seemingly contradictory commitments, with the already noted 2005 World Summit communiqué standing as an illustration with its seeming acceptance of the concept of a responsibility to protect (UN 2005, para. 138–9) appearing alongside reassertions of the centrality of sovereignty and non-intervention in the domestic affairs of states (UN 2005, para. 5). Normative approaches to the English school, and especially pluralism, need to recognize and engage with this inconsistency, even contradiction, because it helps understanding of how and why different communities conceive of and express their normative aspirations in the distinctive context of international politics. If normative theory must be political and contextual, as pluralism asserts, then there is a need to understand the normative value of and potential in this messy picture. That potential comes from further reflection on the knowledge forms identified as so important to community, but not the one—pragmatic knowledge of how to take political decisions—that pluralists usually emphasize. Instead, it is the notions of ‘truth’ and ‘narrative’ that are most helpful because they provide greater insight into the complexity of normative thinking within international relations and also into judgements about the (in)tolerable. 62

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Key here is the way that Suganami’s notion of narrative offers insight into understanding the depth and significance of moral dilemmas and normative challenges that arise in political life. His commitment is to the notion of ‘narrative intelligibilifying’ (1999, 367): the idea that telling stories about the circumstances in which people find themselves enables understanding of what their options are, why action may be difficult or complex, and what are the parameters of permissible solutions. These parameters include ethical parameters: some potentially practicable solutions to problems may be ruled out, even unthinkable, on the grounds of their utter unacceptability to a community on moral grounds. For example, Ken Booth (1995) tellingly makes the point that those who reject ethical objections to state involvement in the arms trade on the basis that, ‘If we don’t sell weapons to them, someone else will’, never make the same argument about child pornography. That stems from a story that democracies tell about themselves as a community that places great emphasis on the moral sanctity of childhood, connected to notions of truth about insight into the ethical standing of human beings that places particular emphasis on the protection of children. That particular notion of truth is a very widely shared one, with, as is often noted, the 1989 United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child being the most widely signed and ratified international treaty, with 194 full members.5 This is not to say, of course, that child abuse through pornography or other means has always held this status. The notion of childhood that underpins the UN Convention and contemporary debate is not a fixed and immutable one, and other practices that would attract moral condemnation, obvious examples include slavery and narcotics dealing, have been valid state endeavours in the not-too-distant past. It is not whether contemporary practice is necessarily better in some absolute, immutable sense that matters here, that is a different argument, but the process of change that explains the narrative intelligibility of these shifts that is important. This is what is universal about normative theorizing— the potential to imagine, express, and debate a different future as a better future (even if one characterized as a return to a prior ‘golden age’) and to locate this within a set of truth claims and a communal narrative. The ability of ideas about truth to establish the parameters of the thinkable, and the position of proposals for change within a communal narrative, create limitations and opportunities for the normative dimension of politics of all sorts. Humans are continuously located within a multiplicity of these nexuses of thinking, something that enables appreciation and exploration of the potential for political dilemmas and the challenges of generating consensus about what is normatively preferable.

5

As of 2013.

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An example of this with relevance to the English school is normative theorizing about war—one of the key institutions of international society. The tradition of thinking usually labelled ‘just war’ stands as perhaps the preeminent example of normative theorizing about war in contemporary international society. That position is not without its risks (Rengger 2013; Walzer 2004, 3–22), and the variety of presentations of just war are themselves diverse—from ‘checklists’ of principles through to complex, casuistic frames of reasoning—but, to my mind, the most persuasive is as a form of social practice (e.g. Kelsay 2013). Kelsay’s analysis picks up on the way in which forms of knowledge we associate with narrative are central to the analytical and normative power of just war arguments. He notes (2013, 69) the ‘historical’ rationality of just war, with argument in this mode reconstructive of a tradition: ‘As a type of historical rationality, just war argument proceeds with reference to the past, in an attempt to fashion judgements about the present, with import for the future.’ Equally telling is that participants in this social practice are consistently portrayed by Kelsay as ‘citizens’ (2013, 68, 69, 70, 73) recalling my emphasis on the boundedness, but multiplicity, of community. Those participants in the social practice of normative debate about the institution of war have a stake—the stake of citizenship—in that debate which helps to guide the purpose of their debate. It is, ‘structured participation in a public conversation . . . In the process of giving and asking for reasons for going to war, those who argue in just war terms seek to influence policy by persuading others that their analysis provides a way to express and fulfil the desire that military action be both wise and just’. (Kelsay 2013, 68). Lang (2013) echoes several of these points through his use of narrative in seeking to understand authority in just war debates and the way in which narrative opens debate to widespread involvement by those who may not possess the philosophical or theological knowledge of the professional just war theorist. Citizens do possess an understanding of the narrative about what their community is, how it came to be that way, and where they think it ought to go that enables them to assess whether proposed uses of violence chime with or threaten the validity of that narrative. That reflects an approach to ethics that is in line with the bases set out in Chapter 1 and elaborated above, and which recognizes that the forms of knowledge involved—transcendental, narrative, and pragmatic—are offered, tested, received, and rejected within a social context of, in this case, citizens. The notion of citizen is, though, as we shall see in Chapter 3 in particular, one that needs to be read more widely than citizenship of a sovereign state—that citizenship is not just a matter of the colour and crest adorning one’s passport. The notion of membership that citizenship brings may be multiple and far wider and far narrower than state citizenship.

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Social practice—responding to political challenges and opportunities— creates changes in knowledge, adding new ‘chapters’ to communal narratives and requiring reflection on truths. What pluralism should seek in such politics is the existence of dynamic processes that enable change and which establish meaningful and intelligible bases for justifying change; that is, situations in which truth may be challenged and where the narrative permits such challenges to exist. Epistemological sclerosis, on this score, stands as morally indefensible. Knowledge systems that freeze accounts of truth or regard a narrative as having reached a definitive end point are incapable of admitting normative debate and thus lose any defensibility in the eyes of the pluralist. At the same time, radical epistemological relativism also fails this pluralist test, because it denies the possibility of truth and portrays narrative as merely the constitutive social apparatus of power by dismissing the possibility of judgement between different knowledge claims. Thus, the idea of pluralism as sclerotic or relativist is misplaced: it must be neither of those things. That makes limited progress in terms of assessing the normative significance of pluralism, however. All social structures embed certain knowledge claims, privilege certain gatekeepers, and deny the validity and admissibility of some claims about change. Not all of these, to the pluralist, can be equally valid. There must be a mechanism for critical engagement with the operation of modes of reconciliation of competing knowledge claims and with the privileging of certain forms of knowledge and certain holders of knowledge. As Allen Buchanan (2002), for example, has argued, the social entrenchment of privileged knowledge holders can result in a host of perverse, detrimental, and unintended consequences. His (Buchanan, 2002, 133–8) notions of ‘expertise imperialism’, ‘status trust’, and ‘epistemic deference’ as elements that limit our moral sympathy seek to help explain how it is that what Buchanan (2002, 2009) labels ‘social moral epistemology’ sharpens awareness of the potential need for continual critical engagement with knowledge practices. Buchanan’s conclusion, perhaps unsurprisingly given his advocacy in relation to reforms of the international political system (Buchanan and Keohane 2004), is that liberal political institutions provide the most effective safeguard against these outcomes because of liberalism’s ‘fundamental egalitarianism that is suspicious of deference to authority and stingy in bestowing status trust . . . reducing the risk that the moral virtues will be systematically disabled by false beliefs’ (Buchanan 2002, 142). Buchanan sees the ability of epistemological structures that create and perpetuate false empirical beliefs (he gives examples of racist and misogynist beliefs about intellectual ability (2002, 138–40)) as central to understanding and countering the kinds of political projects that produce immoral outcomes. As he notes (2002, 150), that does not require us to produce a claim about moral truths, only about empirical 65

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ones. Buchanan acknowledges that an even stronger argument for his position could be built upon foundations that do support claims about moral truth, enabling critique of institutions that perpetuate moral untruths as well as empirical ones, but he steps away from this position because of the difficulty in establishing such a cognitivist metaethical theory. Buchanan’s conclusions are tempting, but for the pluralist they are difficult to support in their entirety. He throws light on the reasons why social structures that embed privileged knowledge produce perverse outcomes, and this supports the pluralist project here of condemning sclerotic and relativist knowledge structures. However, Buchanan’s account is focused upon contexts in which empirical facts are settled and there is clear water between them and metaethical claims about moral truth. That may not always be the case, however, in a range of communities where such knowledge is entangled, for example in deeply held faith-based claims about the nature of empirical reality. It may be undeniable to many that the claims of some ultra-Orthodox Jews, that the world is only 6,000 years old and all evidence to the contrary was placed there by God as a test of faith and a means of separating believers from unbelievers, are nonsense. But they are not nonsense to those who hold them and who act politically on their basis. The equality of men and women may be equally undeniable to many. But that does not prevent former Pope Benedict from holding that ordaining women as priests is a sin equivalent to clerical sexual abuse of children (Goodstein and Pianigiani 2010). Neither did it prevent him from exercising great authority amongst almost one billion Catholics on this issue, backed by the power of excommunication for anyone carrying out such an ordination. For Buchanan it would seem the conclusions one must draw are clear: such social institutions are morally indefensible because they rest upon and perpetuate empirical falsehoods. To some faithful Catholics and ultra-Orthodox Jews the situation may not appear so clear because these practices rest upon empirical claims that are believed to be true and whose truth stems ultimately from divine revelation. Such truth claims are offensive to many, but pluralists, including those who find them offensive, have to ask different questions of the social institutions that perpetuate them than ‘simply’ whether the empirical claims about the age of the Earth and the unsuitability of women as priests are empirically true or not. Instead, as we have seen, it is the openness of the social processes to change that is significant. Can such truth claims be effectively challenged within the community? Are there ways in which the narrative of the community can develop that can accommodate and respect such alternative propositions? Do such truth claims deny the moral standing of different truth claims and those human beings who hold them (as Nazism did to Jews and Judaism, for example)?

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The politics of the reconciliation of competing knowledge claims and the basis of authoritative judgement on the consequences of competing knowledge claims thus become the focus of pluralist assessment of the normative merits of community. As with any contextual approach to ethics and following Suganami’s emphasis on ‘narrative intelligibilifying’, this is a process that rarely results in clear condemnations because most actions, concepts, and knowledge forms have a place within a community. But condemnation is possible. As with Nazism, communities are defending the indefensible when claims about truths or narratives of the community’s place in the world require the denial of the humanity of certain members of the community or of those outside the community. When individuals are declared to possess no moral standing, or to be subject to violence, discrimination, subjugation, or oppression on bases that brook no challenge because they are seen as immutable truths or as incontestable elements of a community narrative, then those individuals are wronged in a fundamental sense. Recalling Arendt’s (1973a) categories, they are made ‘lonely’ or they are created as refugees, those denied the right to have rights through the denial of meaningful community membership. This echoes, but extends and strengthens, the normative conclusions of Benhabib (2002, 184) about one of the key challenges to normative progress in a politics of diversity beyond the nation state: ‘fundamentalist movements that abhor hybridity and deny cultural complexity’. Additionally, conceptions of the ‘realities’ of political power that deny the potential for normative judgement of power, or which create categories such as ‘interests’ that are seen to be beyond normative critique are also indefensible. They deny the location of politics in a communal setting, almost always a multicommunal setting, and are thus doubly damned as being empirically wrong as well as normatively indefensible. As with any such judgement, there is a whole host of boundary conditions that pose immense challenges. Some practices—genocide, slavery, apartheid, child sex abuse—may be seen as easily on the wrong side of the line. Others, such as female genital mutilation, may also not detain the pluralist long in their deliberations. But other practices, such as religious proscriptions on behaviour, are harder to reject for the pluralist because of pluralism’s commitment to accepting that which, to the secularist, may appear irrational, even nonsensical, because those beliefs are no such thing to their holders. What people believe (whether it be a true reflection of the reality of the world or not—and I have hinted at the problems of such knowledge already) cannot be separated easily from what people do. Here is where argument can only fall back on questions about the potential for change in such beliefs and their associated practices, and change in the community narrative about its relationship to the world and to the people with whom they share it.

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For Buchanan (2002: 141–4) liberalism is, as we have seen, the exemplar of appropriate institutions and practices here, and it can be easy to assume that non-liberal systems are sclerotic and thus indefensible because they do not possess the same mechanisms for change, interpretation, and resolution of hard cases, or because they produce illiberal results. But pluralism has to be accepting of such ‘non-ideal’ systems because of the commitment it must possess to the inherent value of plurality in human communities. Liberals may well regard Islamic legal scholarship or Catholic canon law, for example, as fundamentally flawed mechanisms for attaining justice for individuals, or as systems that are almost guaranteed to result in the kind of epistemological imperialism that Buchanan identifies as a key problem, because they privilege certain sorts of expertise as the only valid means of insight into normative goals such as justice. However, it is impossible to deny that such systems are dynamic: they do produce changing and competing interpretations of what the law should be and they can and do produce results that are respectful of human agency and of the moral standing of others. I have already mentioned the significance of the just war tradition in ethical assessment of that political practice and it, of course, is deeply indebted to Catholic theology for both its initiation and a good deal of its contemporary content. Theologically rooted analysis, and not just from within Catholicism, continues to represent some of the most interesting and dynamic aspects of just war theory (e.g. Biggar 2013; Elshtain 2004; Johnson 2007). Theological analysis may not do that always, of course, and it can produce rulings and judgements that are deplorable from a pluralist perspective, such as the account of canon law that equates the ‘sin’ in ordaining a woman with that of clerical child sex abuse. These may well be the instances that attract our attention, but that should not detract from both the actual and the immanent potential for progressive change that does exist in these systems of moral and legal judgement.

Conclusions: Knowledge and International Politics Where, then, does that leave the pluralists’ traditional focus—international society? It should be readily apparent that the idea of pluralism as interested solely in a society of states and claiming a separability or distinctiveness of normative judgement in this society is not a conclusion I wish to defend. A project such as this one, though, in which issues of context, belief, and community are central elements of the consideration of normativity, must also acknowledge those aspects of international society that are contextually distinctive and the notion of a community of secondary, corporate agents— states—that share certain values and conceptions of the common good, 68

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to draw on the most oft-cited definition of an international society (Bull 1977, 13). What I have sought to do in this chapter, though, is to show that the pluralist account cannot isolate an international society of states from the plurality of human community and the contribution such communities make to the definition and attainment of valuable and meaningful human lives. This ought, in fact, to be the defining feature of a pluralist account of international society, and one that places international society and its normative aspirations in a strong theoretical, philosophical, and ethical context. International relations understood as interstate relations is not separable from other forms of politics. The normative perspective that pluralism brings must engage with the penetration, subversion, and bypassing of the interstate domain, not attempt to deny it. An ability to engage with this activity and offer normative assessment is a strength of pluralism, not a weakness, because of the way that it has to acknowledge the role of community in shaping ideas of the good life and in contextualizing the politics of the intercommunal. Most importantly, mechanisms for understanding and thinking about the complexity and lack of unidirectional developments in this politics are key pluralist strengths. Rejecting teleological histories or metanarratives of progress is not just the preserve of the postmodern, but it need not necessarily bring with it an epistemological relativism or reduction of the normative to the status of power play. Instead, pluralism must understand an international society of sovereign states as being an element of a global politics of diversity and one that is inextricably connected with other institutional and procedural elements of global political structures. The claim to superiority and privilege via doctrines of exclusive sovereignty are important but ultimately derivative of the value that this particular political manifestation of community plays in shaping and promoting the normative aspirations of humans and their communities, rather than being foundational for the existence of humans and communities. Sovereign statehood can bring many advantages for certain forms of political communities, such as a degree of security from violence that, in the case of well-functioning states, is hard to match. The access to secondary institutions (such as the United Nations and regional organizations such as the European Union or Association of South East Asian Nations) and the privileged position within international law that sovereignty provides are, similarly, key benefits that make sovereignty attractive to many political communities. However, attaining sovereignty is not a necessary condition for political community per se and it may be impossible, inappropriate, or counterproductive in the case of certain types of community, which are only weakly connected to a specific geographical location, for example.

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As such, the normative status of international society as traditionally defined is also contingent. The notion of it as a ‘middle way’ between a Hobbesian international system and a cosmopolitan world society far from exhausts the possible organizational arrangements of international politics. As Buzan (2004, 128–38) redefines international society—as a state-dominated component of a global order in which transnational and interhuman elements are relatively weak—this becomes clearer. However, the normative status of international society is left hanging by his analytical focus. Here, an international society is normatively defensible and desirable insofar as the values that it enshrines, promotes, and protects are ones that continue to enable the plurality of human communities to be respected and which support a normative vision in which toleration of that plurality is central, yet also constrained. Toleration is not without limits, otherwise it would be relativistic, and the intolerable exists and demands action. Communities cannot deploy notions of transcendental truth, of community narrative, or of the pragmatic demands of power, security, and interest in the defence of intolerance and of the denial of the value of the agency of other humans—for example, through practices such as torture—and their communities—for example, through practices such as apartheid. The same is true of those communities that have established an institutionally privileged position through the notion of sovereignty. Being sovereign does not remove a polity from or place it beyond politics or grant immunity from the standards and practices that ought to apply in all political fields. Our knowledge claims about international society are therefore in need of substantial amendment. The international is not a different world, where different standards and rules apply, and it is a not a place where different epistemological and normative rules hold, either. The neglect of these kinds of questions in traditional pluralism, because of the concentration on the institutions of international society in isolation from the wider political and philosophical landscape, has had highly detrimental effects for the pluralist case. Key amongst these effects has been the neglect of the epistemology of community, a question that ought to have been central to pluralist accounts, but which has instead been neglected in favour of an ultimately indefensible consideration of the distinctiveness of the empirical make up of international society. What makes community important is, in no small part, understood through the distinctive knowledge claims that community makes and the complexity of the politics that arises both within communities, where the dynamic nature of that knowledge becomes key, and the relations between communities, where issues of toleration, mutual engagement, and respect arise. Changes within communities dramatically affect relations between communities and not just, as pluralism sometimes appears to claim, the 70

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other way around, because of a tendency to reify community and to disassociate the distinctive community of sovereign states from the underpinning and more important communities in which individuals live. Allied to an excessive focus on one form of community—the nation state—it is easy to see why pluralism has been in trouble for several years and why such damning judgements as Hurrell’s (2007, 292) can be passed. Normatively, then, pluralism ought to be alive and well, because of the potential that it offers for thinking about difficult and complex issues of normative judgement within and between a diverse range of communities that grant individuals moral standing. They are not just an overlay on an inherent moral agency; the product of birth (or conception, depending on your stance on abortion, perhaps). That makes inter and intracommunity politics more than some sort of overlay upon a cosmopolitan universal politics of rights (or whatever other universal mechanism one prefers). Instead, it becomes the politics of agency itself. The knowledge that we have, the truths that we claim, the stories that we tell about ourselves as members of a multitude of communities and about the others that we come into contact with are inherently and inescapably normative. This is because truth and narrative and their shaping of the pragmatic have to be about the future as well as about the past and the present and they have to conform, in at least some part, with the ideals about ourselves and others that such knowledge brings. Some political choices are ‘unthinkable’—and rightly so. Too many others are all too thinkable, and deny the existence of the moral agency of others in the name of a host of political projects, principles, and claims. Investigation into and understanding of the sheer complexity of the politics of knowledge in a pluralist world view is daunting, but that makes it no less worthwhile. It is certainly a challenge that pluralism has neglected in the past and this neglect in part explains the rather parlous state of pluralism. I have tried to show that identifying key normative propositions about the importance of dynamic knowledge claims has the potential to more securely ground a pluralist position. It has shown it is important not to underestimate the complexity of the political and the normative dimension of the political in particular. The diversity of community, the diversity of knowledge claims and practices, even within the politically focused classification offered here, establishes the improbability of simple normative propositions about the world. It also establishes how it is that political moral dilemmas are real and thorny. Competing knowledge claims and deep-rooted ideas about what is true or right for the community, or what is necessary in the face of political challenges, generate genuine dilemmas that are not resolvable on the basis of clearly delimited right and wrong answers. Because of the diversity of knowledge claims and their centrality to the moral status of human beings, 71

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there are irresolvable dilemmas and radically incompatible positions. In the face of such challenges, the only course of action—analytical and political—is to fall back on process: asking questions about the acceptability of the outcome of communal processes and knowledge practices via the idea of processes that permit the mutability of knowledge through human agency. That possibility creates the potential for meaningful interaction—a point of entry into truth and narrative that can make one another’s claims intelligible and immanently establishes dialogue. That stands for life within as well as across communities, because humans are all members of multiple communities, from the most local to the global, and everybody has to navigate their way through competing normative pressures and within communal structures that reward and punish forms of behaviour. That form of plurality is key to humanity, and certainly to political ethics. Embracing, rather than rejecting, the role of epistemology in ethics and developing a serious and ongoing engagement with the form of knowledge that constitutes agency and enables politics to occur is essential to saving the pluralist strand of the English school from itself. It creates a normative perspective that establishes the inadmissibility of communal practices that are sclerotic and intolerant. It also points to a preference for communities that recognize and embrace their own epistemological dynamics, that keep under question and challenge normative standards and ethical principles, and that recognize that intercommunal interaction is a similarly essential part of the process of immanent critique and change. English school pluralism should embrace social moral epistemology, not simply describe differences and disputes, but that means getting to grips with the interaction of different knowledge types and engaging with the full panoply of community memberships that give people, through membership, their sense of themselves, their place in the world, their relationship to others, and their ideas about a better future.

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3 Rethinking the Society of Sovereign States as a Pluralist Edifice: Community, Plurality, and Globalization

Introduction There is general agreement that the centrepiece of English school theory, its particular and distinctive contribution to international relations theory, its ‘flagship idea’ (Buzan 2004, 1) is its account of a society of states or international society (the terms are interchangeable—I do not propose to alter that convention). That account is a familiar one, at least in terms of its general outline, so familiar that its standard elaboration hardly needs repetition here. More important than a summary is the need to consider how it is that the proposed reformulation of pluralism outlined so far affects understanding of the normative status and stature of the society of states. In particular, in light of longstanding and well-taken critiques that the society of states may, at best, be regarded as a ‘second-best’ (Brown 1995) account of world politics, is it possible to see it as a necessary, if insufficient, element of a ‘first-best’ account? The insufficiency of this traditional account rests principally on empirical grounds. It is simply impossible to argue that the arena of political activity covered by the English school account of the society of states is coterminous with world politics: efforts to do so look quaint at best, willfully perverse at worst. The English school has finally woken up to the empirical realities of globalization, particularly in major monographs by Buzan (2004) and Hurrell (2007), and the dramatic consequences that these diverse, uneven, and frequently conflictual processes are having upon world politics. Indeed, my choice of the term ‘world politics’ in part reflects how the more limited coverage evoked by the term ‘international relations’, with its implicit restriction to the interstate realm, is inadequate.

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Therefore, one potential response to the challenge of globalization—the drawing in of analytical horns to make it clear that an English school project is confined to a limited sub-domain of world politics—is rejected. Again, this is explicable in empirical terms. It is simply not empirically credible to argue for the analytical distinctiveness of ‘international relations’ from world politics in this wider sense. The operations of the globalizing economy, the development of global civil society, the extent of social movements, and the impact of technology are such that the notion that relations between states are plausibly analytically separable from other dimensions of world politics appears incredible. The vast literature on globalization has served to emphasize the multifaceted, multidimensional, and multispeed nature of this complex, interacting, and highly dynamic phenomenon, operating to transform social scales and spaces, as well as our lexicon to describe and frame such things. Socio-scalar terms (globality), new socio-political dynamics (glocalization) are indicative: the lexicon globalization generates helps define the challenge of getting to grips with understanding globalization (e.g. Scholte 2005, 13–84). Efforts to reformulate English school theory to adapt to this changing empirical pattern of world politics are diverse. Buzan (2004) goes furthest, fastest; whilst others, such as Hurrell (2007), have been less willing to offer fundamental rethinks of the traditional structure of English school theory in an effort to get an analytical grip on globalization in its various guises. Neither, as I have shown so far, has extended their reformulations, whether radical or incremental, to the normative realm in a thoroughgoing fashion. Buzan selfconsciously and pragmatically brackets out the normative dimension; Hurrell sees in the analytical reformulation of English school theory an embedding of the solidarist normative strand as the only appropriate way of addressing a globalizing world. Pluralism is ineluctably tied to an account of world politics as international relations that is no longer empirically sustainable and, although the precise logic of this connection is unclear, therefore normatively doomed. Clearly the latter claim is one that I seek to reject. To do this it is necessary to reconsider the pluralist account of international society in a way that does not suggest that it is only within the society of states that pluralism is applicable and that the society of states is not the be all and end all of world politics. Chapters 1 and 2 have gone a considerable way to establishing this position. Certainly the examples and instances that have illustrated my discussion to date have drawn on political issues that go well beyond the interstate, and the discussion has been focused upon emphasizing the significance of non-state forms of community membership and the multiplicity of communities that are active in world politics. Nevertheless, this is a work about the English school, and it is therefore essential that the school’s principal contribution to international relations theory is duly considered. Whilst the society of 74

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states may have lost a near monopoly on what counts as world politics, it nevertheless retains a place of great significance. This reflects not just the historical legacy of a declining ‘Westphalian’ era or, at least, the belief in such an era, but also the particular place of the state as a privileged political community. The concept of community is prominent in this chapter, so the particular place of the state as both a form of community and as a political aspiration for non-state communities will be discussed. My principal task, however, will be to destabilize the centrality of the state as the paradigmatic instance of political community. This consideration needs to work at different levels. The concern in this chapter is to think about core claims made about international society’s normative significance before moving on in the next chapter to think about the idea of institutions as the principal means through which normative significance is manifest in political practices. Here, therefore, I develop an account of the values in play in international society and how they combine, often uncomfortably, to create the overall picture of normative significance. This process proceeds in three steps. First is to look at the classic traditional pluralist claim about the value of order and subject it to critique, drawing on recent English school scholarship in particular. Second is to consider the idea of the society of states as a community in itself, thinking about the commonplace term of international discourse, ‘the international community’. That will also help to develop the concept of ‘community’. Third, the chapter will look at change in international society and how pluralism can reclaim a position as key to understanding the processes of change.

Pluralism and Order in International Society It is inevitable and unavoidable that a project such as this engages with the concept of order. For pluralist accounts in the English school the ability of the society of states to generate order amongst states under conditions of anarchy and diversity is its key normative virtue. Not living in an ‘international system’ characterized by the familiar analogy with Hobbes’ description of a state of nature amongst individuals, gives reason enough to prefer the ordered existence of international society and to demand that political actors of all sorts proceed with great caution for fear of upsetting or undermining the basic constitutive principles of international society and to operate within the accepted institutions that define and govern practice. The concept of order that pluralists usually work with is notable on a number of grounds. First, the prior status of order to other values appears to be an essential proposition, even if some, notably Bull, are curiously uncertain about this (Williams 2006). This stems from the claim (Bull 1977, 4–5) that 75

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there is a universal social truth that any functioning society must have certain fundamental objectives if it is to qualify as a society at all, and that these objectives must be reliably fulfilled and that the means of their fulfilment must be generally accepted as social goods. The objectives, of course, are the existence of rules around the use of violence, the ownership and transfer of property, and the status and enforcement of agreements. Only in the reliable presence of these can we start to talk meaningfully about the attainment of other values, such as justice. The priority of order and justice is always a contextual judgement that cannot be predetermined at the outset, but it is a useful heuristic that order will come before justice (Bull 1977, 93–8). Order in the English school, therefore, is certainly more than just an empirically demonstrable patterning of relations and activities enabling a degree of predictability about future conduct. It is a value that is imbued with normative significance by the members of society as a necessary element of international society’s existence. The existence of order is crucial in both the actual practices of the members of international society and in their self-understanding of the obligations they owe to fellow members. The centrality of practice, and the way in which practice is seen as the manifestation of actors’ locations within a social structure, is something that has been prominent in the ‘practice’ turn taken within English school writings, led by authors such as Neumann (2002) and more widely in IR theory by authors such as Adler (2008) and in normative terms by Brown (2012). In relation to pluralism, the importance of practice has been recently restated by Jennifer Welsh (2011, 1201). The nature of order and the mechanisms to attain it vary dramatically amongst communities and are not necessarily compatible. This claim works to establish both vertical and horizontal differences amongst ordered societies. Horizontal differences cover the claim that different communities of the same or similar sorts of actors achieve order in different ways. For example, rules on property ownership and transfer are very different between a state like North Korea and one like the United States, but both possess such rules. Rules on violence are very different between a Buddhist religious community and one professing a particularly muscular form of Christianity, such as mediaeval crusading orders. Rules on agreement are very different when, for instance, political fealty is owed through personal allegiance, as in clientelism, rather than through the institution of a ‘loyal opposition’ as characteristic of the UK political system. This kind of difference is traditionally important to English school pluralism because it is seen as the sort of difference that precipitates the limited nature of the consensus around order-generating norms in international relations. Those norms must be able to accommodate this diversity and that has come about through hard-won and fragile gains in consensus amongst states as the preeminent political actors.

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Vertical differences recognize that different rules apply to different types of actors. Most pertinent here is the idea that the society of states is just that—its membership is limited to states only and non-state actors, including individual humans and commercial organizations, are not members and the rules do not apply to them. The erosion of this claim has, of course, been a striking feature of the last seventy years or so, symbolized by the declining plausibility of an account of international law that sees it as solely and exclusively applicable to states on the basis of their express consent. The exclusivity of the society of states is still, nevertheless, striking. Whilst the granting of recognition at the UN, but not full membership, to an organization like the Palestinian Authority has bent the rules somewhat, the world’s principal global political organization still reserves membership to states alone. Gaining recognition of statehood continues to be a key aspiration for secessionist organizations, and one granted grudgingly by an international society typically wary of being seen to accede to the territorial dismantling of an existing state. The existence of stable de facto division, often in the aftermath of brutal fighting, can often be necessary to induce international society to accept that a new state has come into existence and that what was once one is now two. Croatia, South Sudan, Eritrea, and Kosovo may stand as examples here. Couching such claims in the language of national self-determination, the key principle behind the post-World War 2 dissolution of the European colonial empires, is also a necessary element of such claims (Hannum 1990; Jackson 1996). The restriction and limitation of the basis of admissible claims to national self-determination has also been a feature of debates about statehood within international society, where national selfdetermination has become a conservative, restrictive principle rather than the radically transformative one of its eighteenth-century originators (e.g. Hannum 1990). Exclusivity brings benefits to a society aiming at creating order amongst its members. A relatively small number of members of a homogeneous class of actors with existing members able to exercise a high degree of control over the admission of new members means that only those likely to conform to established patterns of behaviour gain admission. Only letting in those likely to be committed to upholding the existing order is a huge advantage in protecting that order. The identification of ‘revolutionary’ (Cleva 1989, 67–9; Kissinger 1964, 1–6), ‘dissatisfied’ (Carr 1981, 80–5), and ‘outlaw’ or ‘backlash’ (Lake 1994), or ‘rogue’ states as especially dangerous to international society typifies this presumption in favour of preserving existing standards of order (for a critical perspective on this see Schouenborg 2012). Equally, proposals for radical alterations to practices seen to be in accordance with existing standards of order are usually treated with suspicion. The trajectory of the principle of the ‘responsibility to protect’ over the last decade or so is indicative of how a potentially radical reconceptualization of a core constitutive 77

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principle—sovereignty—has been altered to better fit the pre-existing standards, although not without acceptance of some adjustment to those standards. There are certainly traditional pluralists, Jackson (2000) most clearly, who see this exclusivity as an important virtue. Order is fragile and finely balanced and the expansion of those actors with access to the processes that shape and adjust the operationalization of order needs to be tightly controlled. Mistakes have been made in the past: Jackson’s (1996) critique of decolonization’s creation of ‘quasi-states’, for example. It is important to learn the necessary lesson of preserving exclusivity. The problem with this account, or, rather, one of the problems with this account, is that it neglects the way in which the extent and significance of actors outside the exclusive international society have been transforming the conduct of world politics. Exclusivity has its costs, too. Limited and homogeneous membership means that those actors who are not of the same type, or who do not seek to play by the same rules, or who have a different conception of the nature of order cannot easily be brought within the framework that states have established and seek to preserve. The English school has had a consistent blind spot about the development of a global economy that runs an increasingly autonomous and distinctive global order, for instance. It has also been remiss in relying, until recently, on a highly partial historical account of the development of international society that downplays the significance of many alternative orders, with their associated historical legacies. As Buzan and Little (2000) show, building on the work of Adam Watson (1992), the historical record of the existence, development, and interplay of different types of international systems and societies is more complex, and interesting, than the conventional English school story allows. This has helped to both stimulate and draw upon critiques of the dominant account of the development of modern international society, with its emphasis on the pivotal point of the Peace of Westphalia. These take various forms: from rejections of the historical accuracy of IR’s and international law’s standard portrayal (e.g. Beaulac 2004; Ossiander 2001; Teschke 2003), through to analysis of how a Westphalia-centric account misleads us in our understandings of the development of contemporary international society. In particular, Keene (2002) argues that this blinds the English school to the significance of colonialism in the development of international society. This argument is echoed and extended by Kayaoglu (2010) in his account of how the Westphalian obsession is a phenomenon of nineteenth-century legal scholarship that has distorted the ability of English school and other IR theorists to properly appreciate the nature of the development of international society and the globalization of the European states system. The idea of the pivotal role of nineteenth-century legal writings is reinforced by Peter Stirk’s (2012) account of the development of the concept of ‘sovereign 78

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equality’, with Stirk arguing that the concept achieves its full flowering only in the middle of the twentieth century, with Leo Gross’ (1948) touchstone article, ‘The Peace of Westphalia’, in the American Journal of International Law. This concern for returning to the history and historiography of the development of international society has huge benefits for a revived pluralism. In particular, as Buzan argues, the English school typically tells a very particular story about how the European understanding of international society emerged and how it was spread. Buzan labels the ‘standard’ account the ‘vanguard’ approach (Buzan 2010b, 4–5). This portrays, in stage one, European institutions developing and evolving in the late mediaeval era in isolation from non-European influences and then being spread, in stage two, through colonialism from the late fifteenth century until the late nineteenth century. The decolonization phase, stage three, starting in Latin America in the early nineteenth century and largely completed in the thirty years after World War 2, sees post-colonial states come into existence that have been, through a mixture of coercion and socialization, encultured into the norms, rules, and principles of international society, judged against a ‘standard of [Western] civilisation’ (on the standard of civilization see Gong 1984). Changes have taken place to accommodate their cultural distinctiveness, but these have been fairly trivial in comparison with the obliteration of the sorts of cultural diversity that existed prior to the expansion of international society. This vanguardist account of the globalization of a European model that emerged in pristine isolation before being exported, is contrasted with recent critiques led by John Hobson’s fascinating and provocative account of ‘the eastern origins of western civilization’ (2004). This suggests that a far more ‘syncretist’ (Buzan 2010b, 10–12) account is actually much more accurate. This emphasizes that European ideas, institutions, and practices emerge in a world in which there is a significant number of major civilizations, several more technologically advanced than Europe, such as Middle Kingdom China and the Islamic civilization that, after all, included Spain in its territorial possessions. The cultural interchange and sharing—facilitated even through fairly thin volumes of interaction—had a major impact on the development of the European international system and contributed to its ability to expand, both through stimulating its trading and technological bases and providing a basis for initial engagements with non-European international systems based in these different civilizations. Buzan’s (2010b, 20) account stresses that this narrative takes place within what he describes as a ‘monocentric model’ of how an international society could have come about. This is the idea of the globalization of a European model that ultimately comes to be the only model that dominates. This 79

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includes establishing the sovereign, territorial nation state as the ideal to which all other forms of political community must aspire, or to which they must be sublimated. International society is the product of European domination that serves to largely obliterate other cultural blocs, often portraying its rise to dominance in terms that are deeply flattering to European civilization. As Kayaoglu (2010) argues, compliance with norms of European international society by non-Western states are portrayed as signs of the beneficial effects of interaction with (for which read dominance by) European states. Noncompliance shows how far they have to go in ‘overcoming’ the traits that remain of their original cultural legacy. In contrast, European states’ compliance with their own norms is evidence of their superiority, whilst non-compliance is the necessary and regrettable outcome of having to engage with those who reject such norms. Either way, non-Western cultures are to blame for the violent and norm-breaking behaviour in international society. The threat to order comes from ‘outside’. Aspiration to statehood by such outsiders thus becomes a sign of their becoming ‘civilized’ and privileges the position of sovereign statehood as the zenith of communal political aspiration. Cultural forms that are incompatible with statist political manifestations are marginalized. Buzan (2010b) offers a polycentric account as an alternative to this monocentric account of how a global international society can come about. Polycentrism as an ideal type rests on the idea that a global international society emerges as a result of the relatively equal interactions of different cultural blocs, rather than the rise to dominance of just one of them. Buzan’s interest in polycentrism lies in its potential to explain what he sees as a trend in contemporary international society, where a declining West is having to engage with a rising China, a more assertive and culturally distinctive Russia and the emergence of Brazil and India, both of which are seeking to establish their positions as culturally distinctive. The defence of norms of territorial integrity, non-intervention, and sovereign equality—stressed by traditional pluralists—are thus not just conservative backlashes by authoritarian regimes eager to avoid the critical scrutiny of a predominantly liberal global civil society, but also reflect distinct cultural perspectives on what these norms mean, what value they hold, and how they shape an international society that is becoming much more polycentric and which in the future will be driven by a more syncretist cultural dynamic. We can see evidence for this in the way in which English school theory has been taken up in China. This is both in terms of how Chinese scholars’ engagement with the English school corpus is developing, and also in how they understand the norms that the English school is interested in as working in international politics (e.g. Zhang 2011). For example, the issue of China’s peaceful rise has been discussed within an English school framework by both 80

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Western authors and Chinese interlocutors sympathetic to the English school (e.g. Buzan 2010a; Qin 2010). One of the interesting themes to emerge from this literature is the interpretation placed by Chinese authorities on the norms that are so familiar to pluralist accounts. Classical pluralism’s idea of nonintervention as a means of mediating difference by reducing the grounds for the legitimate recourse to violence is altered by a Chinese narrative based around the principle of harmony (Qin 2010). Harmony clearly has connections with the traditional pluralist emphasis on order, but order and harmony are different things, especially within a Chinese cultural milieu. Alongside the conceptual debates to be had, although not here, about the significance of that distinction is the element of the Chinese account that claims harmony is a distinctly Chinese concept that has been central to the social and political thinking of Chinese civilization (Qin 2010). The rise of China to a leading member of international society thus brings with it a reassertion of an alternative civilizational and conceptual understanding of a key norm that challenges the dominant Western understanding. This adds force to the ‘syncretist’ potential of a ‘polycentric’ future for international society. It highlights how practices of international society throw up accounts of core norms that rest on different bases which the West will have to grow increasingly accustomed to engaging with in the future. Alternative conceptualizations of familiar principles, such as an approach that sees order as harmony and posits a dichotomy not between order and justice but between harmony and chaos, generate distinctive normative debates conducted in a different normative tone. The extent to which China’s rise results in the adaptation of the norms and normative framework of international society to Chinese cultural tropes may well play a key role in the extent to which China’s rise is a peaceful one. Some, such as Buzan (2010b), are reasonably optimistic about this. The impact of differently rooted normative accounts of key principles, whether they appeal to an idea like Confucianism or to more explicitly religiously based notions of political community, obligation, and authority, such as Islamism, are obvious instances of a phenomenon that an international society that has been secularized over the last two and a half centuries or so struggles to comprehend. A pluralism indebted to Confucian notions of harmony is a different kind of pluralism than the traditional one indebted to a Western story of the triumph of rationalism, secularism, and law. The institutional structures of liberal world order built on these foundations may face serious challenges, even crises, as a result of rejection or reformulation by non-Western rising states. Yet they may prove durable, as argued by, for example, Deudney and Ikenberry (Deudney and Ikenberry 2009; Ikenberry 2008). However, as Koivisto and Dunne (2010) suggest, the potential resilience of a liberal world order may be greater than a focus on specific institutions suggests, highlighting that this is no ‘clash of civilizations’ in 81

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the Huntingtonian (1996) sense, but a complex playing out of the interaction of different, sometimes radically different, conceptualizations of the nature of international society that manifest themselves in key political practice. Suspicion and exclusion traditionally dominated the response to such diversity amongst international society’s writers, influenced by a partial account of European history and the skewed history and historiography of sovereignty at its heart (Kayaoglu 2010). This distrust and exclusion has two facets. On the one hand, there has been the empirical practice of international society: for example, the way in which the international legal regime has been constructed on the basis of an account of law that has distanced itself from explicit religious bases. Where such bases have intruded into debate international society has papered over the issue, for example in Saudi Arabia’s refusal to endorse the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948 because of its protection of religious freedoms seen to clash with understandings of apostasy. ‘Internal’ and ‘domestic’ diversity of practice in relation to the operationalization of international legal and normative standards has long been seen as a key aspect of the sovereign agreement to disagree. Limits to the extent of a willingness to put up with diversity have traditionally been seen as highly permissive in relation to the ability of states to coerce those propagating international standards in the face of government opposition, to the extent that for some sovereignty has been a ‘licence to kill’. The empirical nature of international society’s account of order has been reinforced by an intellectual distrust amongst English school writers, led by Bull, of natural law and similar accounts of the normative status and value of principles such as justice, human rights, equality, and so on (Bull 1979b; Jeffery 2008; Williams 2010). The tension between empirical and normative accounts of order is one that Bull arguably never addresses head on, and certainly does not resolve (Williams 2006). Its importance here is how it weakens an account of order in international society through closing off the opportunity for serious engagement with religious and philosophical ethical schemas that lie behind some crucial patterns of behaviour. Pluralism becomes an account of what states disagree about in relation to normative standards, but not a proper account of why they disagree, because of distrust and exclusion of the intellectual projects that provide crucial intellectual context for these disagreements. Accounts of culture such as Buzan’s (2010a) start to get at this problem by problematizing the vanguardist account of the development of international society. Keene’s (2002) work also plays an important part in sensitizing English school writers to historical and historiographical problems with their presentation of the past as a crucial aspect of their account of the present normative status of pluralism. However, we continue to face an account of pluralism that is almost solely focused upon how plurality is manifest in international society and the kinds of political 82

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challenges and opportunities this creates. The deeper engagement with the nature of plurality as an aspect of the human condition and the need for a methodological reassessment of pluralism that results from this, such that what ought to be the core normative claim of pluralism—that the ethical diversity of the world’s communities is desirable—is not addressed. As I have shown already in this book, a revived pluralism stands to gain much by addressing this weakness. Order as a central social value is a common English school claim, but not one that has been properly worked through to the level of human communities other than states. Seeing it as a principally empirical arena of agreement amongst states about principles of interaction, shaped by the need to respond to conditions of anarchy and diversity, is being overtaken by the transformations of that empirical arena by ‘interlopers’ from outside international society. Globalization has to be thought about differently than traditional pluralism is capable of because it is transforming international society in ways that are immensely important and that demand critical and normative examination. The discussion of a revived pluralism in Chapter 2 goes some way to exploring how that process should occur and one of the things that comes out of that discussion is the potential to defend the enduring and continuing importance of international society. However, that needs to go further than the revisions proposed by Buzan (2004; 2010a) in particular if it is to adequately develop a properly normative defence of pluralism, rather than simply expand the range of analytical categories that the English school can deploy in a way that better enables it to respond to changing empirical realities, including the rise of non-Western cultural perspectives on core norms. The normative claims made by traditional pluralism are fundamental to its account of international society, but they are not immutable. International society’s claims to normative significance are profound, but not eternal. They rest on the way in which international society is a viable and valuable component of the manifestation of human diversity in world politics that is the plurality that really matters. The preservation of order as empirical regularity is therefore defensible, and indefensible, on the basis of the extent to which it offers an appropriate means for the protection of plurality. Changes in practice, rules, and laws in international society are indicative of efforts to respond to and manage changing patterns of political behaviour at one level, but their significance and the level of contestation they attract are partially constituted by and constitutive of the underpinning plurality of human life. The controversy attached to cosmopolitan claims about rights and equality in international society is not just a reflection of the cynicism of authoritarian regimes that draw great benefits from a restrictive account of sovereignty, or of the different cultural baggage that their civilizational histories provide. It is also reflective of a genuine global ethical debate about universalism. 83

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International society’s mode of managing such debates in the past has been breaking down. In the absence of ethical consensus, action to prevent ‘atrocities’, as understood by one group, is coercive, non-consensual, and liable to trigger destabilizing and destructive reactions. The ‘revolt against the west’, to borrow Bull’s (1983) telling phrase, can only be prevented if the West does not attempt to push its particular normative notions onto the rest of the world with undue haste and rigour. This position has recently been restated by Jennifer Welsh (2011), in her analysis of John Vincent’s work, seeing in it a normative case for pluralism. However, this remains a remarkably limited argument, reliant first on seeing pluralism as an empirical phenomenon, rather than a deeply normative claim; and second, retaining a highly statist account of both how pluralism is manifest in international relations and the kinds of tensions to which it gives rise. Similarly, solutions to or, rather, management of these problems is something that is justified in relation to the preservation of a very conventional account of order. However, that position has been disputed in practice and fails to satisfy the normative agenda that I seek to defend for a revived pluralism. On the first of these points, the inescapability of the language of rights and the recognition of the dilemmas and risks that the protection of rights brings in world politics can no longer be met with a metaphorical shrug of the shoulders and a claim about the inadmissibility of interference in the domestic affairs of sovereign states. Globalization has helped to bring about the empirical reality of that situation, through the opportunities afforded to global civil society actors and through the technological transformation of communication. But the global institutional framework for addressing and, hopefully, resolving such challenges remains international society. On the second, such a restrictive approach grants more than can be granted to the sclerotic and intolerant. It lacks a normative cutting edge that is a crucial element of a revived pluralism. The efforts to address the most pressing human crises of the post-Cold War era have brought costs, and very serious ones in terms of the intractability of the political difficulties of knowing where, when, and how to take action or not to take action, and the reliance on essentially untestable counterfactuals as the basis for learning from mistakes. Only where the gravest of errors are made—Rwanda in 1994, Iraq after 2003—does reliable consensus emerge about what could and should have been done differently. In most other cases of major human rights abuses, to take one example of significant changes in the normative arguments within international society, the results stressed and the lessons learned are unclear. From the first Gulf War (should the coalition have pushed on to Baghdad?), through Yugoslavia’s collapse (should NATO have taken direct military action against the Serbs earlier?), Somalia’s civil war (how did the US military come to be allowed to dictate a UN operation?) through crisis after crisis in East Timor, Sudan, Haiti, Liberia, Sierra 84

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Leone, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Burma, Libya, Syria, and many others, international society has been unable to identify and develop a clear, consistent, and principled position on what Nicholas Wheeler (2000) dubbed ‘saving strangers’. That failure is, in part, the result of a lack of collective political will, but it is also something that is arguably hard-wired into the normative constitution of international society. All social systems bring with them normative dilemmas: witness dilemmas in liberal societies over questions such as euthanasia, abortion, compulsory organ donation, or treating people with ‘lifestyle’ diseases, to restrict myself to a brief indicative list relating solely to medical issues. A much longer list could easily be produced, as could one relating to social issues and a whole host of other areas. Moral dilemmas are real in world politics, and are even perhaps especially acute because of the role of world politics in mediating and corralling competing ethical propositions. A focus on humanitarian emergencies, of course, identifies only those who have been maimed, murdered, tortured, raped, ethnically cleansed, forcibly displaced, and subjected to genocidal policies in the name of political objectives or by the agents of political actors. The tens of millions who die because they are, at root, poor, have suffered even less consistent attention and consideration. International society’s ethical hierarchy continues to privilege ‘death by politics’ over ‘death by economics’ (Booth in Bellamy and McDonald 2002, 374), and within those categories to single out deaths amongst certain nationalities or in certain places as being of greater significance. Just under 3,000 people killed in New York, Pennsylvania, and Washington on 11 September 2001 are the defining political event of at least a decade of world political history. The deaths of 3,000 children through malnutrition on the same day (and most days before and since) do not, seemingly, matter, save to their families. That, at least, is a familiar condemnation of international society: only those whose death and suffering impact the interests of the state elites who populate international society ‘matter’. Everyone else is an afterthought, and that cannot be right. And it is not right, but neither is it a necessary normative claim in relation to an international society. It may be one that has plausibility in relation to the present constellation of international society, but it is not one that is a necessary condition for the existence of an international society. This is because of the immanent normative critique of international society that a revived pluralism offers. International society must inevitably, because it is an element and not the entirety of world politics, be a selective manifestation of the underpinning reality of a plural world. That means that certain issues, activities, beliefs, actors, and rules will be privileged whilst others are downplayed or overlooked entirely. The utterly devastating impact of a child’s death upon their family, even in circumstances where the death of a child is 85

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tragically common, may, indeed, be a small-scale issue in world politics because of the way in which international society is constituted. Were the constitutive principles of international society different—were family and kinship to be at the heart of the institutional structures of world politics, as they have been at the heart of so many human communal systems—then preventable child death might well be a key ethical issue. Berating international society for not prioritizing this issue is recognition of the existence of alternative normative agendas in world politics, and their waxing and waning as part of the normative dynamics of world politics. A revived pluralist account of international society is therefore more modest than a traditional one, because it sees the temporary nature of international society. The world as a whole has ‘enjoyed’ international society for a brief historical moment and whilst regions of the world have existed with such a structure for longer or at different times, there is not any sort of unbroken and universal story to be told, as the critics of the monocentric, vanguardist approach, like Hobson (2004), argue. The present constellation of international society is changing. A post-sovereign world order is not as remote a possibility as Bull portrayed it in the final third of The Anarchical Society, although many of the reasons he adduced for the durability of international society remain strong (Bull 1977, 282–96). One he underestimated, though, was the centrality of plurality to human life and the normative propositions and principles that manifest themselves in world politics. Order, therefore, is, as traditional pluralism asserts (or ought to where it does not) a prior value (Williams 2006), but not necessarily of the sort that it portrays. A revived pluralism sees order as being about the necessity for normative engagement in conditions of plurality. Order is about recognizing that such engagement will take certain, changing, forms and will unavoidably and inevitably privilege certain issues over others. Those outcomes will establish dilemmas, debates, and disappointments in the normative agenda that help to constitute international society and that also ensure its dynamism. It cannot be anything but dynamic—attempts at ossification are indefensible— because of its connection to the lived social experience of human beings and their communities and the manifestation of this in practice. This ensures that the supposed normative opposition of ‘order’ and ‘justice’ is unsustainable, because order demands a recognition of the plurality of justice claims that exist in the world and the engagement that takes place between them. Resolving the dilemmas of order through the attainment of justice, a key element of the solidarist notion of the transition from international to world society, is illusory. As Matthew Weinert (2011) elegantly argues, the oppositional, mutually exclusive framing of pluralism and solidarism is detrimental to English school theory’s ability to effectively think about the challenges of world politics. Seeing these as ‘ideal types’ for assessing the spectrum of 86

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agreement that exists within an issue area is, for Weinert (2011), a superior means of thinking about the relationship between the normative visions the two camps are seen to offer. Most importantly, he highlights the ongoing, dynamic mediation between the two positions. All social orders necessarily contain normative tensions where the demands of justice are uncertain and unclear. Also inescapable are hard cases where there is a multitude of right things to do, but they cannot all be done; or an absence of any right things to do, but where something must be done. The claim here is that establishing order in the face of these dilemmas is necessary for their active consideration. Preserving and protecting that order is a legitimate component of debates about how to respond to demands for justice, or other values such as equality, liberty, or peace. But it is not the trump card that traditional pluralism tends to see it as being. It is both unavoidable and ethically right to take risks with order on occasions. Judging when one of those occasions has arisen and when it has not produces disagreement. Within the English school, for example, debates throughout the 1990s on when and if humanitarian intervention could be defensible culminated in two opposing views: Nichols Wheeler’s justly lauded Saving Strangers (2000) offering a case for a limited right to humanitarian intervention and Robert Jackson (2000, 291) arguing, in a wider discussion, that preserving the principle of non-intervention was more important. Those debates continue and amongst the political elites of states the development of accounts of the Responsibility to Protect have often invoked arguments made by both Wheeler and Jackson, whilst developing a set of statements, declarations, and agreements that aim to institutionalize the principle. Sometimes the outcomes of practice appear to overturn previously durable consensus, such that a strict defence of the sovereign immunity of state leaders in the face of prima facie cases of war crimes and crimes against humanity has fallen in the face of post-Cold War war crimes tribunals and the International Criminal Court (ICC), for example. This instance, and there are others, has been significantly influenced by organizations and groups that are not states and which have nevertheless proved able to gain access to the decision-making procedures of international society. Whether these be ad-hoc and state-sponsored organizations, like the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (2001) which produced the initial report advocating the Responsibility to Protect, or the coalition of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that played a significant role in gaining a greater than expected degree of autonomy for the ICC’s Chief Prosecutor (Ralph 2003, 2004), the idea of a closed international society is inaccurate. Clearly, that is not to say that access and representation are necessarily fair and transparent. International relations theory, especially through its critical and feminist discourses, has been emphasizing for more than twenty-five 87

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years the power of ‘gate-keeping’ and the inequality of representation, the structural closure of issues, and the silencing of voices (e.g. Tickner 1988, 1997; Vasquez 1998; Walker 1992). It is noteworthy, for instance, that the issue of gender as an institution in international society has only recently been directly addressed within an English school framework, by Eric Blanchard (2011). But things can and do change and the lived experiences of human communities are important to those changes and to the way that the English school offers a theoretical framework for the examination and assessment, including the normative assessment, of those changes. International society’s position as the unchallenged centrepiece of English school theory is in doubt. Whether this is the result of assertions of its empirical decline in the face of a world society predicated upon globalization, or an analytical decline resulting from reformulations of various sorts, that doubt is a good thing. International society’s status is contingent (whether analytically or normatively) because it is a manifestation of human practice and not separate from it, preserved in Westphalian aspic. The order that it is capable of generating in the distinctive arena of the interplay of sovereign states is therefore valuable, often extremely so, but it is not eternal because the normative conditions that grant it value are dynamic and they are dynamic because of their rootedness in human plurality and the communities that are the principal political manifestation of that plurality. The ontological character of order within a revived pluralist English school is thus sharply distinguished from the traditional pluralist account. It does not rest upon, indeed it actively rejects, the idea of a distinct, separate world of international relations in which normative theory marches to a different beat. Efforts to clearly and distinctly associate international society with a ‘Grotian’ normative dynamic (a problematic labelling, for various reasons (Jeffery 2006; Keene 2002)), international system with a ‘Hobbesian’ one (ditto), and world society with a ‘Kantian’ one (ditto again) have a certain analytical utility, but not an ontological one. One of the key ontological claims of English school theory, throughout its existence, has been to stress the continual interplay and ever presence of all three aspects (Wight 1991) and a revived pluralism accepts this insight fully, augmenting it with a political philosophical claim about the ontologically primitive nature of human plurality to express clearly that international society is not an ontologically separable normative environment. Order amongst states is thus restored to its proper place as being one element of an ongoing, practice-based, and contextually sensitive normative debate about the best ways for human beings and communities to address the challenges of sharing the planet. The pattern, predictability, and normative guidance that the society of states contributes to this essential aspect of human life offers certain key benefits, but at associated costs which have to 88

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be borne in mind and not assumed to be bracketed out of normative debate about world politics. This account of order in international society is more effectively grounded in an account of world politics that does not rely on empirically implausible claims about the distinctiveness of international society from other world political dynamics. Neither does it rely on an ontological claim about the normative distinctiveness of international society: that the international is a different place, they do things differently there. Yet, neither do I accept that the contextual and empirical characteristics and the specific and distinctive forms of practice that characterize international society are irrelevant; that politics in a society of states is just like politics in any other location or at any other scale. For reasons discussed in Chapter 2, I have identified the idea of ‘community’ as being one of particular normative significance for this rethinking of English school pluralism. I have offered reasons for why one political manifestation of community—the sovereign territorial nation state— has been highly privileged, and remains so. The next step in this analysis, is, therefore to move on to think further about what a revived pluralism understands by a notion like the ‘international community’ to get a better grip on what is distinctive about it, why that is so, and how much community matters to thinking about ethics in a diverse world.

Pluralism, Community, and the ‘International Community’ The notion of the international community is a commonplace of political discussion and commentary, yet it is a term that is often avoided in academic discussions of international relations. This distrust is understandable. The term as typically used lacks precision and attracts considerable suspicion that the meaning of international community is too often dominated by political expediency: the invocation of the normatively positive notion of ‘community’ in support of the nefarious goals of the powerful (e.g. Buzan and Gonzalez-Pelaez 2005, 31–3). In a way akin to suspicion of claims by political leaders that their ethical judgement on a social problem is in tune with ‘common sense’, we ought to treat invocations of the authority of the ‘international community’ with grave suspicion.1 1 Perhaps the best-known instance of the use of the term by a political leader seeking to establish a particular normative claim came from former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who delivered a speech entitled ‘Doctrine of International Community’ in Chicago in April 1999. The speech established the notion of a ‘Blair Doctrine’ of a limited right to humanitarian intervention that was highly influential, not just on UK foreign policy for the best part of ten years, but on wider discussions of if, when, why, and how to intervene in cases of serious humanitarian crisis, and by whom. A useful, and very readable, discussion can be found in John Kampfner’s Blair’s Wars (2004).

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Yet the term ought to be a useful one to pluralists because of the way that it invites examination of two key issues in traditional pluralism: first, the idea of the international as the interstate and second, the normative status and meaning of such a community. Neither, however, receives much sustained attention in traditional pluralism because of the way in which the assumptions about the exclusive nature of the society of states closes international society off from such sustained engagement. Buzan and Gonzalez-Pelaez (2005, 34–8) offer a brief survey and discussion of the way that English school thinking has utilized the notion of ‘international community’. This reveals how it has been deployed to identify aspects of a ‘thickened’ international society in which groups of states share particular affiliation via common identity, and how it has been seen as an aspect of non-state politics within the loose ‘world society’ concept. They stress the significance of common identity as critical to community, noting that this can reflect historical legacies, such as religion and language, or something that emerges from sufficiently durable and extensive cooperation across functional areas of activity. However, Buzan and Gonzalez-Pelaez (2005, especially 33–4) note that their development of a concept of international community takes place with a particular analytical purpose in mind: assessing the impact of the Iraq War of 2003 on the institutions and practices of a Western international community. As a result, the concept is linked to sociological accounts of the depth of relationships characteristic of a distinction between society (weaker and rooted in ‘contractual social relations based on agreements about rational self-interest’) and community (stronger and rooted in ‘shared identity based on “we-feeling” inspired by affection or tradition’) but with limited development of clear ontological and normative claims. Wider English school theory similarly neglects the concept of ‘community’ as ontologically and normatively significant, with only occasional hints at analysis that could head in this direction, if pursued. Laust Schoenborg (2012, 133 (emphasis in original)), for example, identifies a need to ‘speak of plural and overlapping political communities, defined as “individuals considering themselves and each other to share important interests across a range of issues” ’, but the thought is not fully developed. Perhaps this neglect is explained by the English school not needing to seek to rehabilitate a term as suspect as ‘international community’ because it has international society instead. Challenging that exclusively statist concept, though, and recognizing the unbearable costs of sustaining it in the face of the empirical transformation of world politics brought about by globalization offers an opportunity to revisit this issue. I may, indeed will, still reach the conclusion that rehabilitating ‘international community’ as a useful scholarly term is to swim against a tide of imprecision and political baggage that is too strong. However, the journey is worth the effort for the way in which it highlights how the 90

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destabilization of ‘international’ and the normative loading of ‘community’ are revealing of the challenges that a revived pluralism faces. The plausibility of the normative analogy between the society of states and an international community is dubious on two grounds: the moral standing of the states that are its supposed members and the ability of corporate actors to form a meaningful community. The first point is not to make a claim about a moral hierarchy of states in which, for example, liberal and social democracies sit at the top and corrupt and murderous dictatorships at the bottom. There are lots of efforts to rank states in relation to their performance on human development, human rights, corruption, freedom, and other indicators. The point here is a more fundamental one about why it is that states possess moral standing at all. This is, of course, an old and familiar debate in which philosophical positions are sophisticated, subtle, and frequently well entrenched. From ‘the old lie, dulce et decorum est pro patria mori’ (Owen 1992 [1917], 60), through the ‘romance of the nation state’ (Luban 1980), to the ‘coldest of cold monsters’ (Nietzsche 1969 [1883], 75) recognition of the contestability of the moral claims of the state is widespread. The English school has engaged with these questions principally through the debate about humanitarian intervention, where advocates of a limited right to such intervention have typically taken what might be labelled a ‘weak liberal’ position. By this I mean that basic liberal claims are accepted that the state is a necessary but not sufficient condition for the attainment of a good human life, but that its moral status is contingent upon its ability to fulfil that role: good states can make plausible claims to the status of sovereignty and the privileges and protection it brings, bad ones see such claims called into doubt. There is a need for caution in judgement of claims to ‘badness’ for both inherent reasons—different groups of people sharing a state may well reach decisions about how their communal life should be governed that appear perverse to outsiders but perfectly reasonable to insiders—and the consequences of widespread intervention for other goods, such as order. This is the ‘weakness’ of the position: only the most serious and egregious flouting of liberal principles should attract action by other states. The universal community of humankind does indeed generate rights and obligations that all humans share as human beings, but those are operable in terms of the forcible, coercive alteration of the practices of a specific state only in the face of what Nicholas Wheeler (2000) termed ‘supreme humanitarian emergency’. The ‘necessary but not sufficient’ status of the state can be found rooted in other accounts, too. Jean Bethke Elshtain (2004, 46–50) deploys the notion of ‘civic peace’ in defence of the necessity of a certain sort of state, one drawing on a republican tradition of political thought in which liberalism’s individualism is downplayed in favour of an account of obligation to authority that takes its theme from Elshtain’s reading of Augustine. What this position 91

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shares with a ‘weak liberalism’ more commonly found in the English school is the sense that it is possible to differentiate in a meaningful fashion between ‘good’ (or ‘good enough’) states, and ‘bad’ states in relation to their ability to meet the needs of human beings who are necessarily prior to any collective entity. The neo-Hegelianism of, for example, Mervyn Frost (1996), arrives at similar conclusions, although also for distinctive reasons and via a logic of ‘settled norms’ that derives its force from the distinctive mode of Hegelian reasoning. ‘Good enough’ is not a moral standard that has immediate appeal for many, perhaps, but it is one that a revived pluralism wishes to defend—up to a point, at least. It is also a standard, although known by a different name, which is familiar to anyone with a familiarity with analytical political theory. The idea of ‘non-ideal theory’ can be found in Rawls (1999), for example, where his account of ‘The Law of Peoples’ develops a defence of a differentiation between types of states that sees the privileges and protections of sovereignty extended to states that are, to all intents and purposes, ‘good enough’: his ‘well-ordered’ societies exemplified by the hypothetical Kazhanistan. Rawls’ position on international relations has been subject to a great deal of criticism and rather less defence (e.g. Avila 2007; Caney 2005; Maffetone 2011), but is interesting here because of the way that it adds further to the sense in which a defence of international community has to be alive to the diversity of actors, groups, and bodies that operate at different scales and with different types of claims. This is the path hinted at by Schouenborg (2012), but not fully followed in terms of the full diversity of community or the normative significance of thinking through what ‘international community’ might mean for English school theory. This breadth of ways of grounding similar practical conclusions is intriguing for a revived pluralism, because of the way that it gives pause for thought about the distinctiveness of the moral standing of the state as being ultimately derivative from alternative accounts of the nature of ethics as an essential element of human life. Arendt’s stress on judgement in political action reinforces this claim, linking to the ontological claims made in Chapter 1 about the centrality of plurality. The philosophical contestability of these differing positions also recalls the challenge of plausibility in the way in which thinking through specific issues takes place, such as the moral status of the state in the context of a claim about an ‘international community’. The necessary nature of the competition between ethical claims made by different types of actors, from the individual human suffering grave privation upwards, is one of the most interesting features of the idea because it leads thinking about how community provides an environment within which different normative claims and principles are mediated through diverse social processes. One of the important elements of this account of a revived pluralism is that it needs to stake a claim 92

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to the idea that community is not a singular noun, but is also a verb. ‘To community’ is certainly an ugly neologism and contributes to a trend in which nouns become verbs that offends linguistic conservatives (amongst whom I must be numbered), although that need not in and of itself prevent its adoption. In the way in which athletes now seek ‘to medal’; politicians may one day seek ‘to community’. The importance of this usage is to attract attention, however, rather than as a serious proposal for linguistic novelty. The meat of the argument is that the idea of an ‘international community’ can be used to raise questions about the potential insight that the analogy with other sorts of community offers. The international community, used as a popular synonym for the English school’s ‘international society’, is a discrete, exclusive community with particular rules on membership, particular rules on conduct, and particular rules about the making and amending of rules. It has a narrative of its own creation, development, and future trajectory that is linked to a set of purposes and values. In these ways it is possible to suggest that it holds a good deal in common with other communities with which we are familiar and which frequently demonstrate very similar attributes. It is also a community that utilizes narrative as a knowledge form in order to locate itself in relation to its own past and future, and those of other types of community. It is intelligible through means similar to other communities. As discussed in the previous chapter, such communities must be dynamic in order to be ethically defensible—intolerance and sclerosis are the ethical death knell of community. International society in its traditional pluralist formulation faces that fate. It is an analogy that I have used before (Williams 2002), but traditional pluralism runs the risk of turning international society into something akin to Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast. ‘To community’, then, is to change and to develop and to alter through social interaction, organized around issues of common interest amongst a group of humans sharing a sense of common identity or ‘we-feeling’. Community is therefore understood within pluralism in broad terms. Communities can exist amongst individuals at very diverse scales and they are not exclusive, or at least not necessarily so—to be a member of one community is not to renounce membership of all others. ‘We-feeling’ is a very imprecise basis on which to build an account of community, and there is, as with ‘international community’, a host of qualifying adjectives applied in everyday political discourse to identify and differentiate communities. For example, within the UK context, commonplace political distinctions include the functional (the ‘business community’ or the ‘academic community’), or the religious (the ‘Islamic community’ or the ‘Jewish community’), or ethnic (the ‘black community’), or community labels that relate to particular political projects (in Northern Ireland the idea of the ‘nationalist community’ and 93

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the ‘unionist community’ reflect stances in relation to membership of the UK). ‘Community leaders’ are also routinely sought and their authority invoked in political discourse, pointing to one of the ways in which my account of pluralism aims to restrain the proliferating accounts of community. Political communities are, inevitably, of most interest to me and to revived pluralism because the English school is a form of political theory. A political community is, therefore, a group of people who self-consciously interact on the basis of shared beliefs, practices, and identities sufficient to engender ‘we-feeling’ for the purpose of addressing issues they understand to be political. Those are, typically but not exclusively, focused on questions of community membership, security, and authority; frequently connected with resource allocation and distribution, permissible forms of behaviour, and the bases for interaction with other communities. These debates take place within, but may transcend, a common, but often contested, narrative of the community’s past, present, and future, which shapes claims to and disputes over political questions and establishes forms and terms of debate. This definition draws on the Arendtian ontology discussed in Chapter 1 and also reflects Delanty’s (2011) discussion of the role of diversity in political community. As Delanty (2011, 634) notes, ‘Cosmopolitan political theory has extended the limits of political community beyond the traditional reference points of liberal and republican political theory and the assumptions of much classical sociological theory where the political community in question was largely that of the modern nation state.’ Clearly, my argument accepts this claim and, furthermore, follows Delanty (2011, 636–7) in his recognition that powerful contemporary political dynamics of globalization, democratization, and the extension of rights discourse renders community ever more dynamic—as the extent and intensity of cultural interaction increases, so too does the contestation that it creates. This reinforces the sense that community needs to be understood in its verb form as well as being a noun. As Delanty (2011, 636 (emphasis added)) suggests, there is a need to understand, ‘the implications of cultural diversity, recast in terms of a notion of cultural encounters’. Community is the dynamic context within which politics is possible and through which people are able to act, in the Arendtian sense, and within which politics takes place. The multiplicity of political communities to which individuals belong reinforces this dynamism as people have to navigate, accommodate, and engage with the competing priorities different communities may appear to establish and the demands they place upon them. Wherever there is that element of dynamism in collective life ethics are present because of the necessity of reaching ethical judgements about the options that are available to a community. That includes fundamental issues such as membership—who and/or what is to count and how? The exclusivity of international society in the face of globalization is crumbling. The evidence 94

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for that is compelling, whether it is through the formal acceptance of the participation in major global summits of international NGOs, or through the highly unofficial participation of the protest movements, demonstrations, and camps that such summits now routinely attract. From the development of parallel institutions of global governance, such as the World Economic Forum, through the extraordinary challenges to the power and authority of governments mounted by new social movements utilizing new technologies, most strikingly in the Arab Spring, those engaged in the activity of ‘to community’ is expanding. Not equally, not universally, and not in accordance with many of the standards of justice that we seek to apply in our ethical judgement, that is to be sure, but sclerotic and fundamentally intolerant are not labels that apply well to the ‘international community’ understood in these broader terms. Those reminders of my key normative touchstones also highlight how the notion of community as a verb demands that recognition of and engagement with the normative mediation and management functions of community. Inclusivity has costs in the same way that exclusivity does. It is, undeniably, much easier to mediate ethical debates amongst members who all look the same, think the same, and act the same. That degree of conformity, of comfort with others, is one of the attractions of membership of a community—people want to be with people like themselves. But as the notion of human plurality as a basic truth about the world attests, we can never be with people exactly like us. Even the most closed communities must mediate difference and accommodate diversity, sometimes through the application of archaic rules, customs, and precedents—as in Gormenghast—but that should be a salutary reminder of what happens when the upholding of rules for the sake of the upholding of rules becomes the dominant normative ambition of a community and its gatekeepers. Most communities, certainly a statist international community that is having its gates crowbarred open by the forces of globalization and technological transformation, cannot sustain a social purpose whereby being rule governed to the extent that rules for the sake of rules provides a viable normative agenda. We have become very familiar with the distinction between constitutive and regulatory rules in international relations. The analogy of games is generally used to help think through the former—the rules of chess are what make chess the activity it is, and to depart from them is to cease to play chess, even if a little licence in the way that, say, bishops can move for a little while might retrieve a lost position and revive a game that is on a one-way path to a rather dull draw. The rules of the road crop up as examples of regulatory rules—they differ widely in different jurisdictions, even in basic regards such as which side of the road to drive on—yet they facilitate the conduct of an activity that would be fantastically risky in their absence. What is important 95

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about the distinction here is that constitutive rules create their own normative validity—the value of chess lies in chess itself. The normative validity of regulatory rules is judged against the value of the social activity they regulate—the value of the rules of the road is frequently debated in terms of the contribution that driving makes to other social activities, and only partially on the basis of the value of driving for its own sake. Even the most one-eyed petrolhead would surely accept that facilitating ‘pure driving pleasure’ (copyright Jeremy Clarkson) cannot be the determining principle of traffic law. Yet the pleasure of playing chess comes from the rules themselves in important ways, because of the opportunities and constraints they create for the activity to exist. One can learn conventions and norms about what is good play, what are appropriate responses to an opponent’s moves, and one can appreciate that variation in, for example, the amount of time permitted for completing a set number of moves can test different skills and attributes, such as directness and aggression over subtlety. But these leave the basic game intact in its essentials. The rules of community as a verb have to encompass both of these functions: they have to constitute and regulate community and they have to do so in and through interaction with other communities. Looking to the international community to respond to an international event of some sort is, in the first instance, to look to see how we should constitute an empirical occurrence, necessarily granting it normative significance of a particular sort. It is then to ask about how it should be regulated, asking about the particular means that are appropriate to responding to its ascribed ethical significance. This is a discursive, even performative, process, imbued with significance from a variety of perspectives and with implications for the future of the rules involved, as well as for those actors directly affected by the issues immediately at hand. In particular, the international community always faces challenges in that it is unable to draw on a single, settled set of either constitutive or regulatory rules. Even in relation to what has traditionally been regarded as central to international relations—war—what does and what does not count as war is open to debate and interpretation. The ‘war on terror’ is a classic contemporary example, but there are many others that relate to warfare. For example, as Peter Stirk (2009) shows in compelling detail, the nature and meaning of military occupation as an act of war, or not, has been in constant flux since before the modern attempt to constitute and regulate it emerged in the Hague regulations over a century ago, with significant implications for both occupiers and occupied. The nature and forms of claims to authority, and the extent of that authority, alongside the responsibilities and obligations of occupier and occupied are all shown to be unclear, with local, temporary, and unstable resolutions arising out of contextually specific practice.

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International community as a verb is about the mediation and amelioration of the competing understandings and interpretations of the complex interplay between different sets of constitutive and regulatory rules. The plurality of perspectives and the diversity of actors that seek to participate in this process in a great variety of ways highlights how it is that international community cannot be understood in a way that neglects this active dimension, because to do so is to reduce it to a noun and that robs it of most of its normative significance. When the international community, in this pluralist sense, is able to reach a consensus it is necessarily a limited, contested, and mutable consensus. But that some degree of stability is achievable in the way in which issues are constituted and appropriate regulatory frameworks are identified at that moment carries normative power. As long as the potential exists for change, as long as contestation and debate continues within the international community, and as long as that consensus endures then it is not meaningless to speak of the ethical power of the international community as carrying authority. That claim to authority will, inevitably and unavoidably, disadvantage some communities in world politics—one cannot please all of the people all of the time and one certainly cannot do justice to all of the people all of the time, especially when the consensus on the substantive content of global justice is so weak. There are, though, some claims to authority that are comparatively stable and secure. In the international community of world politics that is, as it is in the traditional pluralist society of states, a situation not entirely divorced from the ability to wield coercive power. But in neither case is it solely the outcome of the ability to wield coercive power. These claims about international community have emphasized the dynamism of the notion: the way that it is a verb at least as much as it is a noun. I have also made some claims about change in relation to the dynamism of rules and the normative significance of both stasis through consensus and the immanent potential for change. Chapters 4 and 5 will address these further and in greater detail, as well as developing the sense of how to judge the normative significance of different voices advocating change and stasis. This discussion, therefore, establishes how a revived pluralism can utilize the concept of community to think about the nature and status of international society as it is typically understood within the English school. As suggested, I do not propose to replace the concept of ‘international society’ with one of ‘international community’, because of the baggage the term brings and the limited utility such a shift would offer. Nevertheless, what this discussion has served to show is that revising the English school’s focus on international society as being solely comprised of states, with an assumption that those states represent stable political communities, is analytically and normatively essential. To do so must embrace the plurality of community and the role that cultural diversity plays in intercommunal interaction and 97

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the corresponding impact on political forms. As Delanty (2011, 652) notes, ‘it is the logic of the encounter that defines the space of the political’. Those intra and intercommunal encounters, with individuals entangled in multiple community memberships, are profoundly dynamic. It is necessary at this point in the argument to turn to the issue of change in some further detail to elaborate on these ideas and to see where this leaves the English school’s notion of international society.

Change in International Society Structural theories of international relations are usually thought to have a problem with change or, at least, that is a classic criticism levelled at neorealism (Kratochwil 1993). The challenge of accounting for change in a revived pluralism is of a different order, though, to accounting for alterations in the structural principle of the international system. Yet the argument here is that the English school, as asserted by Buzan (2004), is usefully thought of as a social-structural theory. Clearly, this is one in which the structure is far less stable and its effects far more wide-ranging than we would associate with even a social structural theory like Wendt’s (1999). The multiplicity of communities with the potential to participate and the greater openness to normative dynamics that do not conform to a statist account of structure are just two of the ways in which a revived pluralism differs in its analysis of international society. The similarity, often noted and explicitly developed by Buzan (2004), between Wendt’s propositions about anarchy and the English school’s account of international society is weakened in a revived pluralism. Yet there is one aspect of the account of change associated with a Wendtian approach that is of significance here, because it is the aspect that impacts most directly on the way we typically approach normative questions in international relations—the role of force in the creation and imposition of social structures. The deployment of ‘depth’ in the understanding of the adoption of new norms of behaviour that Wendt introduces and Buzan develops in the English school context is a useful addition to the classical English school account. It is easy to be sceptical about the extent to which rules and norms of behaviour matter if we do not have a good account of why it is that they are followed that addresses adequately the charge that the threat of force underpins rule-following behaviour. The spectrum of coercion–calculation–consent admits the possibility of such explanations, but also acknowledges that rule following can take place for a variety of reasons. Internalization is the traditional English school assumption about the rules of international society, written in to its definition (Bull 1977, 13)—that states recognize a common good in the operation of certain institutions and practices—but the greater 98

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analytical scope of coerced or calculated compliance makes an important addition. There is typically an assumption that it is normatively preferable for rules to be followed as a result of internalization rather than coercion, although this is obviously dependent on the rule in question. Better, for example, a coerced non-compliance with the rules of apartheid than an internalized compliance with them on the grounds of the social legitimacy of racism. But we nevertheless remain wary of the idea that progressive change can be the result of coercive action: witness widespread scepticism about the long-term durability of imposed democracies, like Iraq after 2003, or even those political changes which stem in part from the involvement of outside agents, such as NATO’s role in assisting the 2011 Libyan revolution. There is a sense that, to be normatively defensible, social change ought to be in some meaningful sense ‘authentic’: that is, the result of the efforts of those who are the beneficiaries of the change. To have ‘properly’ internalized the social rules and normative standards they reflect is to have arrived at them as a result of a community’s reflection on its own unique experiences, unsullied by external influence. This concept of authenticity in the process of change—that it is the outcome of the freely chosen wishes of the community affecting change—ought on the face of it to be a key element of a pluralist account of the ethics of change. The opportunity for plurality and communal diversity to be reflected in the conduct of world politics in ways that shape and alter the rules and institutions of the practice in accordance with the values and traditions of those communities should be a normative ideal. Coerced change, even change adopted on the basis of calculation, ought to be fragile, uncertain, and liable to instability. As is often noted, and has been so at least since J. S. Mill (1984 [1859]) made the point, freedom granted by outsiders is unstable and liable to collapse because it lacks appropriately strong foundations in the will of the people. Freedom granted, not won, is not properly freedom at all. Looking further back, I hear echoes of Machiavelli’s (1961 [1514], 84) observation that, ‘Wise princes . . . have always . . . made use of their own forces. They have preferred to lose battles with their own forces than win them with others, in the belief that no true victory is possible with alien arms.’ This, admittedly rather stereotyped, account of the argument about change and authenticity is not, though, one that a revived pluralism should seek to defend. That may indeed appear counterintuitive, for what could be more pluralist than defending a set of political structures and processes that enable communities to exercise free will and decide and defend their own fates? The reason for scepticism about this notion of authenticity and the account of change it offers lies in an ultimately empirical rejection of its plausibility. In international society, change just does not happen like this and, more importantly, neither can it happen like this. The English school is not about 99

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defending normative propositions that are empirically implausible. Advocacy of a normative direction of travel must be rooted in an empirically plausible account of actual political dynamics and practices. Idealism in the pejorative sense is a charge that can be levelled at pluralism just as much as it can at solidarism if a defence of diversity relies on an appeal to a romanticized notion of the ‘authentic’ voice of the community. Key to the implausibility of such a notion of communal authenticity is the implausibility of understanding any human community in the kinds of pristine terms such a stringent notion of authenticity requires. There may, possibly, be ‘lost’ communities in the world’s most remote places who live ‘authentic’ communal lives, but basing an account of world politics on this experience is, obviously, unwise. Change for pluralists must therefore be understood against the empirical backdrop of intensifying social, political, and economic interaction driven by technological transformations that have social-structural implications, as discussed in notions such as ‘interaction capacity’ (Buzan et al. 1993). Interaction capacity is not a normatively neutral phenomenon. Not only is a world in which communication takes place via high-speed internet connection and warfare is conducted through long-range precision guided munitions, unmanned aerial vehicles, and, in the not too distant future, battlefield weapons platforms with independent decision-making capability, a very different one from that of 200 years ago, it is also a world in which ethics are different, too. As Benhabib (2002, 28–37) argues persuasively, appeals to the radical incommensurability or untranslatability of cultures are overstated and philosophically implausible to the point of being untenable. That has always been the case, and it is even more so now as a result of the intensification of interaction caused by globalization. What is more, of course, intercultural communication and exchange combines with intracultural debate: ‘The lived universe of cultures always appears in the plural’ (Benhabib 2002, 41). That plurality drives normative change because it grants purchase on issues, events, and actions that enables—indeed demands— normative assessment as an inherent part of the debate. A revived pluralism sees debates over a range of issues, and the perspectives presented, in this light. It emphasizes that the effectiveness of appeals to change practice in the light of changed circumstances are not debates that take place solely within hermetically sealed cultures subject only to assessment by ‘insiders’ according to ‘their’ standards alone, but necessarily as engagements with intra and intercultural debates. Membership of multiple communities by almost all individuals means that they cannot be anything other than such debates. Some of these debates are somewhat self-consciously ‘intercommunal’. There has, for example, been extensive discussion within both the Western and Islamic traditions of thinking about the ethics of military force (e.g. Kelsay 100

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2007, 2010). Over the last decade or so this has, for obvious reasons, focused on the nature of terrorism and counterterrorism, with substantial implications for an understanding of, amongst other things, the ethical status of noncombatants (e.g. Coady 2004b). At the margins of debate are those positions, expounded by Osama bin Laden, for instance, that US citizenship alone is enough to qualify one as a ‘combatant’ in the sense that one is a legitimate target of military action. This was not done on an entirely idle basis. Bin Laden’s declarations and fatwas are laden with (carefully chosen and dubiously interpreted) Koranic references and invocations of the authority of Islamic scholars in order to locate his account of combatant status within a specific normative context (for analysis of claims to authority see Zehr 2013). Some people find these accounts to be persuasive, whilst others—the vast majority—do not, but all can at least recognize the framework being invoked even if they see Bin Laden’s reading as the grossest perversion. They can use that framework, and others, to mount critique. The US government of George W. Bush deployed the historic and specific notion of ‘illegal combatant’ in its discussion of the status of detainees at Guantanamo Bay, and the development of practices such as ‘extraordinary rendition’ contributed to an ethical critique of such practices that see them as betraying fundamental ideas about human moral agency. The widespread deployment of Giorgio Agamben’s notion of ‘bare life’ in critical analysis of Guantanamo Bay in particular and the development of overseas interrogation centres in locations such as Abu Ghraib and Bagram Airbase, along with the spaces of extraordinary rendition, is indicative (e.g. Minca 2005; VaughanWilliams 2009). This nevertheless locates the novelties and innovations of the war on terror in an analytical framework that asserts the significance of such locations and associated practices in relation to a wider critique of modernity. Here, ‘bare life’ and the creation of ‘spaces of exception’, such as Guantanamo Bay, are located within an analysis of the role of power in the creation and maintenance of a discourse of modernity that very much emphasizes the role of social practice in the construction of meaning and the granting of privilege and authority. Conventional human rights arguments, such as those deployed in relation to the striking rekindling of debate about the permissibility of torture in the Western world (e.g. Bellamy 2006), are also grounded in social practice. These are often the sorts of practice that post-structural analyses, such as that indebted to Agamben, are keen to destabilize. Human rights accounts, for example, frequently stress the absolute inviolability of individuality, the negation of which is seen to be the essence of torture. It is not just the infliction of pain, the levels of which became a notorious topic of debate following publication of the Bybee memorandum (2002), which marks out

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torture as being so odious, but the denial of the possibility of a victim’s rights through the destruction of their individuality. The social contexts and practices in Western liberal societies debating these changes are key to understanding the way in which such debates work. The concerns of different communities within and across states are reflected in these debates. They are not monolithic and different people may feel pulled in different directions by the force of different arguments. There is a genuine debate to be had about issues such as the balance between, for instance, liberty and security, freedom of information and privacy, religious tolerance and equality. That debate is, by its nature, irresolvable in any definitive sense because of the complexity of the context of intra, inter, and multicommunity participation and the way in which the outcome must be unstable because an appropriate balance between competing and incompatible goals is always ongoing within a specific social context. Typically, such discussions are seen as taking place in state contexts, but this is to neglect crucial aspects of the discussion for understanding international society and its place within a wider, world political, context. The role of non-state actors in all of this is, of course, complex and contested. In one way, they have been direct participants, precipitating several lines of debate in the form of national liberation movements, terrorist organizations, transnational corporations, international NGOs, and so on. In other ways they have been reliant on state actors to put in place orderly structures and regulatory frameworks that create the opportunities for their action. Yet the sustainability of a clear ontological divide between such actors and the normative status they can claim looks to be increasingly doubtful. Sovereignty, certainly, no longer looks able to provide that distinguisher given the dubiousness of so many of the bases upon which it is deemed to rest, especially in highly integrated parts of the world, such as the European Union. Even elsewhere, information technologies have systematically penetrated control over flows of information; movements of people have strained established concepts of migration and asylum to the limit; finance has almost entirely escaped state management efforts; and violence has become increasingly privatized via state failure in some instances and the conscious, market-driven sub-contracting of military functions in others. The ‘organized hypocrisy’ attested too in the title of Krasner’s (1999) book is losing empirical and normative purchase, at least in many of the four senses that Krasner articulates. That is not to understate the enduring importance of statehood as a normative aspiration for many communities. The historic privileging of the state as the preeminent form of political community has not suddenly gone away, and nor is it likely to. For many political communities, attaining recognition of their sovereignty by the other states of international society is a political

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aspiration whose value is hard to overstate. Kurdish and Palestinian communities, to take two obvious examples, have invested political effort and human life into a communal aspiration for statehood that continues to dominate debates about their political futures. The specific institutional manifestation sought by different political communities is not a choice made in a vacuum and ties to states, whether actual or aspirational, are powerful, as the link between the Jewish Diaspora community and the state of Israel exemplifies (Baron, forthcoming 2015). My argument here, however, is that statehood has been unnecessarily and unjustifiably privileged, both ontologically and normatively, by traditional pluralist accounts of international society. Failure to provide room within pluralism for even admitting the potential significance of multiple community memberships and non-state community forms into pluralist debate is both empirically and normatively indefensible. These communities, as with states, are not all ‘good’, or even ‘good enough’, even in terms of the relatively weak criteria for ethical indefensibility established in Chapter 2. Recognizing their significance alongside states is not to assert their necessary superiority to states as a community form, or to normatively endorse non-state communities as an ethically superior alternative basis for organizing world politics. They are, I believe, crucial to understanding increasingly important forms of world politics and they are central to understanding the organizing principles of forms of world politics, but this is not a binary proposition: traditional international society or non-state world politics rooted in alternative communities. It is a balance, and one that shifts. That, I argue, is a good thing, in an ethical sense, because of pluralism’s normative rejection of sclerosis. A revived pluralism therefore offers a more extensive account of change than traditional pluralism is capable of, with its emphasis on the stability of institutions and the limited room for admissible manoeuvre that they permit. Exogenous sources of change, like technology or the economy, are left unaddressed in any systematic fashion, their normative implications often uncertainly grasped or shoehorned uncomfortably into existing institutions. Traditional pluralism cannot adequately comprehend the decline of sovereignty and non-intervention as its logically necessary corollary. Indeed, its inability to do so is critical to Hurrell’s (2007, 292) sounding of pluralism’s death knell. There is no necessary reason why this should be the case. The slow death of the ‘Westphalian’ system may be lamented by some, or possibly many, but celebrated by others. It comes at some normative cost, as any such change does. The protection offered to weak states by the norm of sovereignty is not trivial, even if many states of the world have exploited that protection as a screen behind which to hide the abuse of minorities and individuals.

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The measure of significance comes with the embedding of ideas in social practice. Normative propositions that give rise to new social practices, or where existing social practices are adapted to incorporate new normative ideas, establish a basic test of significance. There is a need to assess the scale and extent of this change, which is hard because of the huge diversity of scales of communities that a revived pluralism wishes to accommodate. Some communities—Jackson’s significant statespeople, for example—number in the few thousands; others—the global community of Roman Catholics, for instance—in the hundreds of millions. Numerically quantifying significance is impossible because within all communities some people possess greater authority or standing than others, the degree of involvement in a community varies, and people have multiple community allegiances that may see them embrace some changes, but not others, because they conflict with other obligations. Numerical measures are insufficient. Instead, less specific, more nuanced, and in some ways less satisfactory measures remain, which rely on comparison of current practice with previous change that is recognized as being significant. Assessment is by analogy and comparison, seeking normative change that is shaping social practice in ways that make it implausible for that social practice to be assessed against normative standards that do not include those whose emergence is being assessed. That is an uncertain yardstick to deploy, but it may be the best there is. When there is no going back—when excluding a community or a set of normative ideas is no longer plausible—then change has occurred. It is necessarily difficult to identify in advance which putative changes will fulfil this standard and even gaining consensus on when it has taken place is not straightfoward, especially in the abstract. To illustrate with some contemporary examples that may add some solidity to this position, we can look at the ‘triumphs’ of just war theory and human rights. Michael Walzer (2004) has written of the ‘triumph’ of just war theory, arguing that it is now almost impossible to imagine that discussion of the ethics of military action will take place without recourse to the categories and concepts the tradition deploys. For the most part, he argues, this is a very welcome thing. The notion of warfare as an amoral activity, simply a means to an end, is no longer asserted by almost anyone who thinks seriously about this activity. Whether it be the legal frameworks that are used, the approach to military education, the tenor of public debate, the framing of policy, and the identification of situations where military force is an appropriate tool to apply, ethical issues are prominent. This has not always been the case, of course, and neither has it necessarily been the case terribly recently. To give one pertinent example, Winston Churchill famously dismissed as ‘psalm singing defeatists’ prospective opponents of plans he asked to be drawn up in 1944 to ‘drench German cities in gas’. 104

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He argued that ethical objections to operational practice were essentially arbitrary, noting that using gas had been perfectly acceptable in World War 1, but bombing open cities was regarded as absolutely abhorrent, whereas less than thirty years later the position appeared to be the exact reverse. In a typically pithy analogy, he suggested that such ‘silly conventions of the mind’ were as variable and as consequential as the length of hemlines for women’s skirts (Norton-Taylor 1998). In an age of Wikileaks and misplaced laptops, it is perhaps difficult to imagine a senior British political leader committing such thoughts to paper today, so some may argue that the official triumph of just war theory is a masquerade and that in private, off the record, and away from note takers, microphones, and email, political leaders and military chiefs will continue to express such cynical views about the ethical constraints within which they are supposed to act. Certainly, even within the most well-regulated militaries, breaches of the laws of war and the principles of just war occur. Walzer’s (2004) point is not that the triumph of just war theory has seen the world’s military organizations turn into paragons of virtue. It is not even to support the ‘few bad apples’ defence that is frequently put up—that such transgressions are the result of individual actions and are not reflective of structural or cultural problems. It is instead to assert that such actions are seen as transgressions of just war principles and are explained and sometimes punished in the same terms. The normative aspiration for military conduct is framed almost exclusively in just war language, and even where circumstances cause some to argue for a change in those standards, as has been the case in the ‘war on terror’, then it is framed as amendment rather than simple abandonment of the principles. Outside of the world of well-regulated state militaries, the triumph may not be so extensive, yet even here there is evidence that military conduct which lays claim to be just draws upon the lexicon of just war theory and certainly aims to deny or conceal the worst abuses. Alternative conceptions of just military action to that elaborated and defended by Walzer are also in play— notions of jihad as holy war maintain a claim to normative justification via an established tradition of ethical thinking. Even the most heinous and intolerable actions can see the invocation of ethical traditions, exemplified in recent history by Adolf Eichmann’s extraordinary claim to have been following the Kantian categorical imperative in his contribution to the Holocaust (Arendt 1964, 135–7). The sometimes jaw-dropping implausibility of the claim to be in accordance with ethical tradition is in itself evidence of the power of such tradition. Social practices cannot be legitimized without seeking to locate them within an acceptable ethical discourse, and the outcomes of political judgement about such actions are often importantly shaped by the success or

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failure of such framings. As Ken Booth (1995) aptly noted, we only know of the existence of human wrongs because we have a language of human rights. That language has become inescapable in international society, traditionally understood and in a more expansive account of world politics. Frequently, this can be in tension with the triumph of just war theory. Arguments as diverse as those of David Rodin (2005), Larry May (2005), and Martin Shaw (2003), for example, attest to the difficulty of reconciling a fundamental claim to the rights-holding status of human beings with the just war tradition’s sanctioning of the lethal targeting of human beings on the basis of their role or employment, rather than on the basis of their representing a direct, mortal threat. This is just one instance of where the language of human rights comes into conflict with other approaches to thinking about the moral status of individuals and where the tensions that exist between the priority to be granted to different rights arise. This is normal and desirable. So too is debate about the nature and status of rights and their relationship to community. The triumph of human rights is not, therefore, in terms of a single account of rights offering an all-conquering philosophical account of the moral agency of human beings. For some people, of course, it may do exactly that—those who dispute such claims are simply wrong or unreasonable—but that is hardly in tune with a pluralist position. It is, nevertheless, clear that the language of human rights has become inextricably entangled with the conduct of world politics. Within international society the relationship between rights and sovereignty has been a core concern since the end of the Cold War, with huge implications for the agenda, conduct, and tenor of politics. It is the case that the conduct of politics amongst states, and the conduct of world politics, can no longer take place immune from the language, concepts, and theories of human rights. That is a very substantial normative shift, one to set alongside the way in which the conduct of war cannot occur without being analysed in relation to the language, concepts, and theories of just war. From torture, to war, to poverty, to gender, to minority communities, to disability, to sexual orientation, the language of human rights is powerful, prominent, and promoted; and is debated, denied, and denigrated, too. The crucial point here is that it is unavoidable: a substantial and important normative shift has occurred. Significant normative change is a feature of international society. Whether in relation to rights, warfare, economics, territory, or a host of other practices and principles, the normative environment within which states operate is dynamic and connected to the wider diversity of communities and the actors they create, support, and remove. The test of normative significance is one that is only clearly answered in hindsight, however, no matter how irritating that may be to those for whom predictive accuracy is the key test of a good theory. We cannot know in advance which normative challenges will succeed 106

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in establishing themselves as a necessary element of the discourse of international society and which will fail. We can form educated judgements based on previous experience as, for example, efforts to produce a general model of a ‘norm cascade’ suggest (Finnemore and Sikkink 1998), but general models are always that—general. There are exceptions, surprises, and shocks, both in relation to which norms successfully cascade and in terms of the complex, even chaotic, knock-on effects on other norms. The last twenty years have witnessed several surprises and shocks, with previously seemingly settled issues—the unacceptability of preventive war, torture, and state-sponsored assassination, for example—all being challenged by the world’s most powerful state. The fate of the Bush Doctrine, though, highlights a point already made about the relationship between power and normative innovation in international society. Without the power of the United States it would seem reasonable to assume that a doctrine of preventive war would never have got as far off the ground as it did. Proposed by Algeria, say, or Indonesia, the fate of such a doctrine would have been easy to predict. Ideas such as ‘critical mass’ and ‘tipping points’ and the need for great power buy-in highlighted in the idea of norm cascade emphasize the connectedness of politics and ethics, something that pluralism, as we have seen, necessarily accepts. A community’s ethics are not formed in isolation from the politics of that community and its location in wider political contexts. One of the most important and telling criticisms of a traditional pluralist international society relies on this claim: that it is overly conservative, and that critical voices and the subaltern view, capable of providing the most telling ethical insights into established structures, are excluded. The idea that if you want to understand the ethics of a power structure, do not ask its beneficiaries but ask its victims, relies on the existence of victims—that there are situated, contextual perspectives and there is a hierarchy of insight available depending on an individual’s location within that hierarchy. Marx’s famous claim about the point of philosophy not being to understand the world but to change it is therefore one that ought to chime with a revived pluralist viewpoint on international society. The ‘critical perspective’ and the ‘subaltern view’ are examples of the kind of contextualized ethic that any established community needs to be open to if it is to satisfy the minimum standard of toleration outlined above. That does not mean that such groups necessarily find it easy to gain access to, let alone affect change in, international society—they would not, by definition, be critical or subaltern if that were the case. Their marginalization is a necessary defining element of their status and yesterday’s subalterns—the national liberation movements of colonial Africa, like Zanu-PF, for instance—are amongst today’s established, conservative defenders of the sovereignty status quo. 107

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Conclusion The goal of this chapter was to look at the way in which the bases for a revived pluralism discussed in Chapters 1 and 2 would play out in thinking about the normative status of international society, the traditional centrepiece of English school theory. The elements of international society I have focused upon—order, the status of international society as a community, and a normative assessment of change—have served to demonstrate that the consequences of a revived pluralism are extensive. What has helped to tie this account together is the underpinning question of the ontological status of international society and the normative logic that informs that ontology. A key shift in this argument for the revival of pluralism draws on arguments that international society should be understood as a set of practices within a narrative about order in world politics because of the way that narrative forms of knowledge are so important to the ways people seek to make sense of the world and to inform the ethical judgements and decisions they make. The dominant narrative of international society has, of course, been the Westphalian one, but this has come under increasing pressure for a number of reasons in recent years, as discussed earlier in this chapter. This dismantling of a comparatively straightforward story about the nature and purpose of international society and its relationship to other, wider, political dynamics has served to reiterate the importance of the knowledge that is sought, the means used to seek it, and the narratives that are constructed to give that knowledge meaning through its purchase on the world around us and insight into the judgements that have to be made in the face of complex and difficult challenges. International society as narrative, as a story told to enable people to make sense of the social world, is not the end of the ontological story. What is important to the conclusions I reach here is that the story of international society is a continuing one, which calls for attention to the narrative structures that are created to make sense of that ongoing process. This picks up on Chapter 2’s principally epistemological claims: that the types of knowledge that are judged admissible and relevant have a substantial impact on normative conclusions. The Whigish temptations of a liberal solidarism that sees a progressive path towards the eventual triumph of human rights and democracy may be a straw man rather than any sort of reasonable characterization of the solidarist position in the English school, but it is not unfair to assert that the solidarist account of pluralism typically accepts without much consideration that it is necessarily conservative, even reactionary, and accepting of a statist, Eurocentric narrative of world history (Kayaoglu 2010). Rejecting that narrative characterization means linking the intelligibility that narrative offers to an account of the ontology of international society that 108

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emphasizes its rootedness in plurality, and the consequent significance of human community as a necessary manifestation of that plurality. The previous chapters elaborated on the possibilities of an Arendtian basis for such an account. International society is, therefore, not, as Bull sees it, a separate political world from that which characterizes politics within states that are assumed to be the political institutionalization of community. Instead, it is a manifestation of a world politics that is constituted by and constitutive of diverse human communities that in their turn give particular meaning to the lives of the human beings that populate them. International society is an important element of that world political picture, but it is not an isolatable one, populated by corporate actors—sovereign states—that enjoy a necessarily separate ontological and ethical status from the other participants in world politics. States do enjoy a particular, even special, status because of the ascription of value and authority that attends the designator ‘sovereign’, but as Brent Steele (2013) highlights in another context, ‘authority’ is not unconnected from its ‘authors’ and those are the members of a political community whose acting creates, sustains, and develops the institutional manifestations such as states. They enjoy a degree, and a varying degree, of autonomy but there are limits to that autonomy. Those limits are created by the interactions of communities at multiple levels: whether it be the ‘rules of the diplomatic game’ and international law, or the many and various mechanisms through which political accountability is sought and exercised, corporate agents cannot ever entirely escape the authors of their authority. Where there is serious disjuncture we expect to see an effort to recreate and renew that linkage. That may be via popular political protest, civil disobedience, open rebellion, or a host of other measures at local, state, regional, transnational, and global scales and in diverse functional or identity-based realms. Only occasionally does the bond between the authors and the authority break, to create unlimited political power in the form of totalitarianism and its associated scope to choose to remake the world over which it exercises its authority in almost any way and at almost any cost to those caught up in its destructive vortex (Arendt 1973a). That includes international society as its institutions and values are ripped apart, too. A revived pluralist account of international society therefore sees it as being a component of world politics. It is particular and distinctive because of the corporate nature of its members, but it is inextricably entangled with and ultimately dependent upon the complex of human communities that play into international society in a variety of ways. International society, as with other global level social systems, and regional and local social systems, too, is a skewed, or warped, or partial representation of that world political picture because it performs certain types of functions, acts as an arena for the exercise 109

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of certain sorts of power and authority, and because it claims a certain sort of normative status. Those distortions are a necessary element of attempting to get to grips with the complexity of world politics—differentiation and prioritization between certain forms of activity is unavoidable—and they take on a variety of bases from the functional, to the geographical, to the normative—but they are also subject to change. The next stage in this project, then, is to look at another of the central ideas in the English school perspective in order to see how change manifests itself institutionally. Institutions play a fundamentally important role in how the English school approaches the study of political activity, because it is through institutions as collections of practices, organized around norms, and in the performance of key functions in the maintenance of international society that change is most easily traceable. That will add further focus to the normative account of pluralism I am developing, because it will enable the emergence of a clearer basis upon which to assess institutional dynamics and argue for a particular perspective as being distinctively pluralist. The problem for traditional pluralism is that it is typically seen as being very wary of change and this hamstrings its ability to engage with world politics in an analytically effective manner, weakening its ability to offer a persuasive normative argument. As I show, though, a revived pluralism does have the potential to offer a far more dynamic, progressive, even radical normative account of the institutions of international society. Indeed, the argument will be advanced that a revived pluralist account of institutions has the potential to reverse the normal account whereby pluralism is seen as conservative and solidarism as holding a monopoly on progressive argument (Williams 2005). A progressive, radical pluralism rooted in claims about plurality can provide a powerful normative cutting edge in assessing the development of institutions of world politics.

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4 Institutions, Plurality, and Resistance

Introduction The discussion of international society so far takes more or less for granted the particular character of that society as experienced in the final quarter of the twentieth century and the first decade and a half of the twenty-first. As our consideration of change shows, however, that particular character is very variable. Historical surveys by Watson (1992) and Buzan and Little (2000), alongside other work tracing the impact of particular historical developments, such as the rise of nationalism (Mayall 1990) and the role of colonialism (Keene 2002), all remind us of this important fact. Central to the particular character of international society is the specific constellation of institutions: those durable patterns of social behaviour and beliefs that condition the pursuit of common goals and interests through framing and regulating actions, typically within specific issue areas. The best known list of those institutions, Hedley Bull’s from The Anarchical Society (1977), identifies five such institutions: diplomacy, international law, the balance of power, war, and the special responsibilities of the great powers. That list, setting to one side its inadequacies, enables us to think about an international society that is clearly distinguishable from one characterized by, for instance, mercantilism, colonialism, war, diplomacy, and dynasticism, to take a plausible historical constellation from Europe around the turn of the eighteenth century; or a speculative future one characterized by a universally accepted Islam establishing the common value of all human beings as vice regents of God on Earth, international Sharia law, and pacifism. Getting to grips with institutions is an important part of any effort to develop English school theory. Traditional pluralism has been prominent in thinking about and debating institutions, with Jackson, Mayall, and Holsti all adding substantial contributions to debates about institutions (summarized in Schouenborg 2011, 29). It will come as no great surprise to discover that I am dissatisfied with their contribution, given the critical perspective on

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traditional pluralism that characterizes this book. In particular, the argument that I seek to advance in this chapter wants to take on the rather ‘establishment’ view that typifies the lists of institutions found in most English school texts, particularly pluralist ones. This will augment what I see as the most impressive and useful way of thinking about institutions in the English school at present, Buzan’s (2004) account in From International to World Society? From there I also, again unsurprisingly, want to develop the normative logic of institutions, looking to show how it is that a somewhat reformulated account of institutions can develop the normative logic of a revived pluralism. The chapter is therefore organized into three main sections. The first of these looks at Buzan’s work on institutions in English school theory, summarizing what is for my purposes its key contribution. In particular, the concept of ‘secondorder societies’ and ideas of ‘master’ and ‘derivative’ primary institutions emerge as a fruitful location for normative enquiry (Buzan 2004, 161–204; Schouenborg 2011). The second section offers a critical perspective that seeks to build on Buzan’s account of compliance with institutional strictures to show that his account of institutions necessarily excludes those institutions that are unable to overcome the substantial obstacles to gaining purchase on the practices of international society. This will be explored through the idea of ‘subaltern institutions’. Finally, the chapter will consider the distinctive contribution that institutions make to a revived pluralism and the potential they offer for contributing to the operationalization of a revived pluralism’s distinctive methodology.

Theorizing Institutions in the English School: Taxonomies and Compliance Institutions are a crucial element of English school theory and a good deal of recent work has gone into attempting to clarify their nature and role, look at the ways in which they perform their distinctive functions, explore how they appear and disappear, and how it is that they relate to one another. The most appropriate methodology for defining, categorizing, and investigating institutions has also featured in recent work, alongside other efforts to better get to grips with the methodological dimension of English school theory (Wilson 2012). Buzan argues that there are two related reference points that can, at least up to a point and for the purposes of this discussion, be combined. The first is that institutions are ‘relatively fundamental and durable practices, that are evolved more than designed’; the second that ‘they are constitutive of actors and their patterns of legitimate activity in relation to each other’ (Buzan 2004, 167). 112

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This account of institutions highlights two features that are significant for subsequent discussion. The first is that institutions are engaged in mediation of the distinction between constitutive and regulatory rules, with institutions as usually understood in the English school being more closely allied to the idea of constitutive rules. These are the rules that establish the social world that grants meaning to the actors and establishes the bases upon which their interactions take place. Constitutive rules of a social practice are what enable us to distinguish between different types of social practice by recognizing that they are distinctive forms of activity, aiming at different social goods, conducted by different types of actors, and carrying different normative status. Regulatory rules guide and govern the conduct of relations between the actors so constituted. They establish procedures to be followed under certain circumstances, including how to alter established procedures, and what should be done in the case of transgression of the rules, amongst other functions. The concept of the function of institutions and, indeed, functional categories of institutions is something that is driving other writers interested in institutions in English school theory, such as Laust Schouenborg (2011). The second feature is that institutions are necessarily social practices: they arise from interaction amongst social actors which they also in part serve to constitute. What is important here is to emphasize that the regulatory rules that exist within and are established by institutions are entangled with their constitutive role: by establishing who or what counts as a valid actor and how such actors should act in relation to a certain social practice, institutions have a crucial role to play in establishing ethical reference points and privileging certain normative assumptions in relation to conduct. Discussion of this role and the relationship between types of rules often takes the form of an analogy with games. The rules of the game (chess is the usual one discussed) not only establish what permissible moves in the game are, they also constitute the pieces themselves. As early as the 1960s Charles Manning (1962) set the English school off along this path with his idea that international society can be thought about as being the game of ‘let’s play sovereign states’. The idea of games as a reference point in this debate is useful, up to a point, because it helps us think about the relationship between constitutive and regulatory rules, but also helps to show us the limitations of the analogy. The key limitation in relation to the idea of institutions in English school accounts of international relations is a fairly straightforward one: the pieces on the chess board are, as Buzan (2004, 178) notes forcefully, not the players. The rules of chess constitute what it means to be a ‘bishop’ or a ‘queen’ and establish how those pieces may operate. They establish other standards—what it means to win a game, when a game ends in stalemate, and so on. Regarding states as being pieces on a board, performing certain functions in accordance 113

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with the rules, is a limited analogy because what is typically more important, especially from an ethical perspective, is the context within which actions that comply with regulatory strictures sit: who is pushing the pieces, what motivates them, what are the consequences of these moves, who sets the regulatory rules, and so on. Therefore, regulatory rules are only part of the story, even in the context of a game like chess. The regulatory rules can also serve to constitute what it means to be a ‘chess player’, because compliance with those and other rules of play are an irreducible part of participation in the game of chess. There may be a wider set of social expectations and mores that surround the idea of being a ‘chess player’ in terms of knowledge of and engagement with the history and tradition of the game. This is partially constitutive of human agents who self-identify with those expectations. That may take a critical form, as well as a laudatory one. A famous example comes from the words Raymond Chandler (1953, 159) puts into the thoughts of his great fictional private detective, Philip Marlowe—a chess enthusiast: Chess can be ‘as elaborate a waste of human intelligence as you can find anywhere outside an advertising agency’. Many games have debates about the values and conduct of their players and about how that relates the game to the wider social world in which those players operate. The idea of professional sportspeople, for instance, ‘setting an example’ to aspiring young players is commonplace, with controversies arising when leading players are felt to have somehow let their fans or the game down by misbehaving. That may be in their professional life—by being seen to cheat or engage in ‘gamesmanship’—or in their non-sporting life—through poor behaviour.1 International relations is somewhat different. In the first instance, the ‘players’, even if we limit ourselves for the time being to Manning’s sovereign states, are also engaged in a host of other constitutive rules that establish their place in diverse social practices. Additionally, states, of course, are not necessarily agents in and of themselves, although it is a commonplace of debate to talk of them as acting as though they were. The idea of corporate or collective agency, including moral agency, is deeply contested and debated in IR (e.g. Erskine 2003; Wight 2006). That contestation is somewhat sidestepped in 1 Examples are likely to be culturally specific and not travel well but, to give two UK examples, the 2013 controversy over the decision by Stuart Broad, the England cricketer, not to ‘walk’ when he edged a catch to slip but was given not out by the umpire might stand as an example of the first. The behaviour by certain members of the England rugby union world cup team in New Zealand in 2011, most notoriously engaging in an alcohol-fuelled ‘dwarf-throwing’ contest in a nightclub, may stand as an instance of the second. For non-sports fans, perhaps the fate of the leading BBC children’s television programme, Blue Peter, which was revealed to have ‘rigged’ a viewers’ vote on naming the latest pet to feature on the programme and had a presenter photographed by a newspaper taking illegal drugs might demonstrate the point. Readers, I’m sure, can supply their own sporting, or other, instances: plagiarism as an act usually fatal to an academic’s career might carry transcultural weight amongst readers of a book like this as an instance of the first phenomenon.

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English school discussions of institutions, although Buzan draws the important distinction between first- and second-order societies: the former made up of individual human beings, the latter being, ‘where the members are not individual human beings, but durable collectivities of humans possessed of identities and actor qualities that are more than the sum of their parts’ (Buzan 2004, 26). There is, therefore, an assumption that collectives can be thought of as actors and that institutions play a significant role in constituting some collectives as such and, by extension, denying that status to others. Some of that is a functional differentiation: certain sorts of collective or corporate actors perform functions that are crucial to the effective operation of an institution. However, some of that differentiation may also be normative: certain sorts of collectives may perform functions that are in accord with institutions but lack crucial characteristics that make such performance legitimate. A common instance is the role that the concept of ‘legitimate authority’ plays in differentiating between groups engaged in acts of violence that accord with the institution of war (e.g. Fabre 2008). Other collectives may strive to change or even overthrow the existing institutions, and thus struggle to gain acceptance of the legitimacy of their cause, or even of their existence. International law, for example, illustrates this struggle to get to grips with the legitimacy of the authority of non-state armed groups involved in revolution, insurrection, or civil war against an established government. The limited applicability of common article 3 of the 1949 Geneva Conventions dealing with non-state armed conflict and the complexity of and potential for subjectivity in the decision making involved in these circumstances, and which aspects of international humanitarian law and other law applies, is well known (e.g. Solis 2010, 96–104, 152–4). Making a judgement on the admissibility of claims to be a ‘legitimate authority’ in the use of force is just that—a judgement. It involves complex balancing of a range of factors, which may not be mutually consistent, against a specific set of circumstances. These may change, too, as when, for instance, a non-international (common article 3) conflict becomes an international (common article 2) conflict or vice versa, or when a conflict demonstrates elements of both non-international and international conflicts (Solis 2010, 154–7). The decision as to which regulatory rules apply reflects and is reflected in how the rules are used to constitute actors as possessing a certain character. Who makes those judgements is also, of course, important, because of the way that institutions privilege some actors over others in the process of judging and in the authority that their judgement carries. This tends, as I hope to show, to load the dice in favour of the established actors with stakes in the maintenance of the existing institutional constellation. Identifying a means by which that privileging may be challenged and alternative perspectives and claims to authority granted access to judgement is an area of great opportunity for a revived pluralism. 115

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The separation of constitutive and regulatory rules is, therefore, imperfect. However, it is a useful heuristic device for normative theory in this context because it helps to highlight how the interplay between regulatory and constitutive functions serves to privilege certain sorts of actors over others. It also emphasizes the importance of judgement in assessing which rules apply, when and to whom, and when and where exceptions might be made. Recognizing the necessity of judgement in such circumstances demands recognition of the normative component of debates about rules. This is not simply a function of the needs of the ‘game’ being played, but reflects the wider context of the understanding and distribution of power within a given social milieu. Rules that empower and enable simultaneously exclude and disable, inviting assessment of the merits of that social practice. That assessment is necessarily substantive, as well as requiring more straightforward assessment of compliance, because it calls for judgement of the merits of competing claims over the nature and meaning of rules and the fallout from their particular propagation and operationalization. Abiding by the rules is a significant part of all ethical systems and, I suggest, is a central component of ethics for many people. The distinction between types of rules though, and the effort to establish hierarchies of regulatory rules, can disguise as much as they reveal about ethical behaviour when there is limited and unstable consensus about the wider social purpose of the particular ‘game’ being played. Normative theory needs to ask additional questions that peer into those issues, recognizing that, as with all heuristic devices, it is important not to mistake the device for the reality into which it offers necessarily limited insight. A revived pluralism, therefore, must ask these kinds of prior questions about the constitutive and regulatory rules that are the more typical focus of traditional pluralist analysis and judgement. As Ian Clark’s (2005) account of legitimacy in international society makes clear, judgements about the nature of institutions and the course of action they mandate in any given set of circumstances are substantially normative. Legitimacy is ‘a more fundamental property, of which these institutions are an expression’ (Clark 2005, 21). Legitimacy, for Clark, ‘defines international society’ (Clark 2005, 24), such that institutions are a variable manifestation of this underpinning normative account. An understanding of what it means for an international society to exist is essential in order to recognize which institutions, as stable patterns of durable social practice, are important for it; and how the operation of those institutions affects in turn that understanding of international society. As discussed in Chapter 3, traditional pluralism has been too ready to see that understanding of international society as being pretty static, whereas my argument here is that it is much more dynamic. That dynamism is best engaged with and understood through looking at the changing make up of the institutions of international society. That change includes 116

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not just the make up of the list but also the kinds of actors constituted as members and the practices legitimized through membership. This is not a one-way process, though, as I have indicated. The limits of the analogy of ‘rules of the game’ have to be accepted—players are only partially constituted by the rules (they are not inanimate chess pieces) and how they play (and how they play the other games they are engaged with) feeds back into the constitutive function of the rules. And behind that lie more fundamental normative questions about the social practice itself. Nevertheless, institutions play a crucial role in enabling us to identify the actors, practices, and ideas that constitute an international society because, for instance, institutions privilege states over multinational corporations as actors through the ascription of sovereignty to the former but not the latter. The institution of sovereignty plays a crucial role in thinking and practice about the nature and location of the fundamental political attribute of authority. Attaching it to particular territories and asserting the supremacy of sovereign authority over other forms of political authority creates both the character of states as actors and crucial behavioural norms such as the principle of nonintervention in the domestic affairs of sovereign states, the inviolability of territorial borders, and the weakness of international law. The legitimacy of this particular social constellation, as Clark (2005) argues, is dynamic and complex. It is also crucial to the durability of international society, as a loss of legitimacy results in an inability for the key actors to retain authority. As Thomas Franck (1990) argued, legitimacy can be thought of in terms of a ‘voluntary pull to compliance’: legitimate rules are complied with because people believe compliance is obligatory and not because they are simply fearful of the coercive consequences that may result from transgression. That is a spectrum, of course, something I shall consider in more detail later, but the legitimacy of the constitutive rules of international society can be assessed through the extent to which the actors they constitute and the behaviour they reward and punish are accepted as being in accordance with the common social goods international society aims to attain. Sovereignty constitutes authority in a particular fashion and the regulatory rules that flow from the dominant conception of sovereignty establish certain forms of behaviour as laudable and others as deplorable. That is not to say that authority does not exist in other social practices, such as family life, firms, civil society organizations like religious orders, and so on; but it is to highlight the distinctions between ‘let’s play monastic orders’ and ‘let’s play sovereign states’. Sovereignty goes much further than many social practices, because of the range of thinking about practices that are associated with sovereignty. For example, practices related to the use of violence are conditional upon understandings of sovereignty, as is the nature and meaning of control of territory. The value that attaches to territory is shaped by a 117

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particular account of sovereignty that links it to the idea of nation. That was not always the case, of course, as dynastic accounts of sovereignty linked territory to personal ownership of the dynast. Nevertheless, what this suggests is how, in highly ‘Westphalian’ accounts of international relations, to stop thinking about sovereign states when thinking about international relations is, in effect, to stop thinking about international relations and start thinking about something else. Stopping playing ‘let’s play sovereign states’ and starting to play ‘let’s play multinational firms’ is to leave an idealized ‘Westphalian’ social practice and start on something separate and distinctive. Similarly, fundamental thinking about economic activity is constituted by certain actors, practices, and ideas associated with the market. Thinking about economics without thinking about markets is, arguably, to stop thinking about economics at all and to start thinking about something else. That, as with sovereignty, is a historically specific condition. There are economic systems that have not had a market arrangement at their core and have rejected the kinds of economic practices that tend to be taken for granted in current practice. Schouenborg (2011, 38) highlights how unusual a marketbased, capitalist political economy is, in historical terms. Communism is the obvious alternative instance, insofar as we can regard the practices of ‘really existing socialism’ in the old Eastern bloc as being communist. Nevertheless, market relations as understood within liberal capitalism did not operate and notions of communal property were widespread. China offers a very interesting mix at present of aspects of a market economy but with strong state control over certain market functions, like the free movement of people and information, and a firm hand on issues like the value of the currency, in contrast with more thoroughgoing liberal economies which have allowed currency values to vary far more freely. Purely anecdotally, but indicatively, within my memory a UK pound sterling has bought a tiny fraction over US$1 and US$2.50. Similarly, I can recall the existence of strict UK currency controls forbidding the movement of sterling by private citizens, beyond a rather trivial level, out of the UK. Such a situation is met with almost goggle-eyed disbelief by current undergraduate students because it appears so completely at odds with dominant understandings of how globalized currency markets work. A particularly interesting contemporary alternative to the ‘market’ as usually understood is the rapidly expanding Islamic economy, where Islamic finance, for example, wrestles with the competing challenges of facilitating economic growth and competition in a recognizably capitalist form, but without recourse to the tool of interest because of an unambiguous religious proscription. Alongside a ban on the levying of interest lie other religiously required practices linked with Islamic conceptions of justice that further differentiate Islamic economics and finance from conventional, liberal-capitalist economics 118

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and finance. Islamic economists and financiers are just as active as their ‘conventional’ counterparts in their efforts to produce a range of financial products and services that enable Muslims to do business within a competitive, market-oriented environment that is increasingly globalized and integrated, whilst fulfilling religious obligations originally set down in the seventh century CE and under utterly different circumstances. Sharia compliance becomes a crucial issue for such economic institutions, with authority assigned to a semi-independent council of experts ruling on the acceptability or otherwise of different types of activity.2 Schouenborg (2011) argues that such observations fall foul of the charge of ‘presentism’—seeing in the contemporary order practices and beliefs mistakenly assumed to be fixed. His solution, building on preliminary observations by Buzan and work by Donnelly, is to argue that institutions can indeed be thought about in the constitutive terms stressed here, but that it is also necessary to avoid the error of ‘presentism’ by differentiating, analytically, between on the one hand the constitutive function of institutions in a specific, historically real international society, and the regulatory consequences that they establish, and on the other, the generic regulative functional categories, to borrow Schouenborg’s (2011, 39) term, which they fulfil. This analytical move brings potential advantages, but it further serves to isolate the normative dimension of English school theory because such categories are stripped of any inherent substantive content and the merits or otherwise of specific institutional manifestations of these regulative functional categories is a matter for consideration in relation to the standards of legitimacy in play at whatever point in time we choose to focus our analysis. There is no possibility of these ‘abstract analytical lenses’ (Schouenborg 2011, 40) containing normative content. At one level this is useful to a pluralist account, because it suggests that institutions are not ‘good’ or ‘bad’, ethically speaking, because of their compliance with abstract, fixed ethical principles. However, at another, more important level, it is damaging to a revived pluralist case because it reinforces the sense in which normative analysis is separated from the social structural account of the English school (Dunne 2005, 70–8). The work on institutions considered above has been very valuable in adding analytical clarity to a key English school element and helping thinking about the relationship between institutions and other social practices of a clearly related kind, such as rules, norms, and laws. This work has, in particular, developed the idea of primary and secondary institutions, enabling a consistent distinction to be drawn between durable and coherent social practices on

2 I am indebted to my colleague Habib Ahmed, an expert in Islamic finance, for the example and to a number of Islamic finance Ph.D. students at Durham University, whose presentations on aspects of their research have provided valuable background. See, for example, Ahmed (2009, 2013).

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the one hand and the formal organizations that instantiate and operationalize elements of those practices on the other. Additionally, within the primary institution category, Buzan proposes a distinction between ‘master’ and ‘derivative’ institutions which has the potential to help English school theorists think in detail about the ‘nesting’ of institutions inside one another (Buzan 2004, 176–90). For example, a master primary institution like sovereignty produces derivative master institutions like non-intervention and international law. This is designed to get at the way in which broad and fundamental means of constituting central issues and actors have regulatory effects that are also frequently durable and stable. Buzan’s approach, and that of others prominent in the English school debates about institutions, such as Holsti, have been criticized by Peter Wilson (2012) for relying on a ‘stipulative’ approach to definition; that is that they establish a definition of ‘institution’ prior to empirical enquiry. Wilson’s preferred approach draws on ‘grounded theory’, borrowed from sociology, to propose an alternative in which empirical practice is allowed to lead theory, ensuring that conceptualizing institutions and the theory developed to understand their operation is reflective of the practice and language of those who populate institutions in the real world. Wilson’s argument somewhat overstates the case for the distinctiveness and incompatibility of these two approaches—Buzan and Holsti may indeed initiate enquiry in a stipulative fashion, but both seek to confirm and adjust concept and theory through empirical enquiry—but Wilson’s position is a useful reminder of the way in which efforts to create a theoretically consistent concept of institutions has limitations. Wilson’s argument also points towards a further challenge in relation to institutions—who decides which ones are in place? As Buzan (2001, 487) notes, ‘[international] society is constructed by the units, and particularly by the dominant units, and consequently reflects their domestic character’. International institutions, whether based on stipulative or grounded definitions, are the institutions of the establishment. The normative consequences of this are something that I shall elaborate in the next section of the chapter, but it serves as a useful reminder of the way in which analytical claims—in this case about the institutions of international society that are worthy of study— bring with them normative baggage. One further important limitation revealed by considering practice is the need to recognize that the constitution and regulation of one set of social practices has consequences for the constitution of others. The ways in which master institutions constitute international society have consequences for the core regulatory mechanisms that are likely to be followed. Again, the English school has engaged with this kind of issue extensively, although not in quite this way, before. John Vincent’s (1974) analysis of the non-intervention norm 120

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shows how it is a logical corollary of a conception of sovereignty that emphasizes final authority over defined territory. The well-known tension between order and justice, whether that be the principally distributive approach to justice Bull discussed in The Anarchical Society (1977, 77–99) or the more rights-based approach to justice that he touched on in the Hagey lectures (Bull 1983) and which has been central to the English school’s engagement with humanitarian intervention (e.g. Wheeler 2000), reflect the regulatory logics of competing master institutions. ‘Westphalian’ sovereignty strongly encourages non-intervention; the equality of human individuals as rights holders strongly encourages a responsibility to protect. Without a clear resolution of the relationship between those two—and one thing international society is not is philosophically consistent—serious political challenges over what to do when pulled in competing directions are unavoidable. In a view usually ascribed to Isaiah Berlin and recently restated by Michael Ignatieff (2012, 13), ‘absolute values . . . conflict absolutely. All good things cannot be had at once’. International society offers nothing even approximating a resolution to this problem through institutions, indeed it offers a manifestation of the inescapable reality of this dilemma which, in itself, helps point towards a preference for normative visions of international society that are rooted in acceptance of this reality, as opposed to a ‘view from nowhere’ that seeks to transcend reality. This will be discussed further below. Buzan’s (2004, 187) list of contemporary primary institutions goes far wider than Bull’s (1977). His list is also indicative of the rise and fall of certain institutions, such that Bull’s concerns about the post-colonial implications of demands for equality are seen by Buzan as having been substantially resolved. In particular, Buzan sees the equality of people (i.e. of individual human beings—in contrast with an anti-colonial emphasis on equality of peoples, plural) as being a master primary institution, but that this does not produce derivative institutions of the sort that might have been the case in the 1960s and 1970s—such as national liberation struggles—but ones of human rights and humanitarian intervention. Equality of people is thus separated from and placed at the same level as sovereignty, rather than being seen as derivative from it in the way that, again, some might have argued in the past. Other master institutions in Buzan’s list have undergone similar historical changes to that of the equality of people which, as he notes, could have been better rendered as the inequality of people in most classic English school writing (Buzan 2004, 184). Nationalism is a late eighteenth-century addition; the market a nineteenth-century addition; environmental stewardship a late twentieth-century addition; territoriality has undergone consistent shifts in meaning and significance as the status and content of Buzan’s derivative manifestation—boundaries—shows (Buzan 2004, 180–5). In an interesting development, the concept of gender has been persuasively proposed for the 121

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status of an institution of international society, one that would join the list of master primary institutions (Blanchard 2011). This work presents an account of institutions in the English school which goes a good way to offering a much clearer picture of how institutions should be understood, how to differentiate between types of institutions, and how to understand their relationship to one another. The idea of master primary institutions emerges as constituting the basic social practices that enable description of the nature of the social order that exists amongst the various participants and which establishes who those participants are. Thinking back to Bull’s (1977, 9–16) threshold criteria for distinguishing between a ‘system’ and a ‘society’, we can anticipate master primary institutions constituting actors and regulating their behaviour in, at least, the arenas of violence, property, and agreement. That, for the English school, is a minimum list, but not a maximum one. Master primary institutions exist in relation to other realms of social activity. Most obviously, in the context of Bull’s work (1977, 77–99), this directs attention towards the arena of justice, whether that be the sort of economic justice that underpinned the calls for a new international economic order that attracted Bull’s attention, or the way in which a master primary institution like universal human rights interacts with another, similar, institution of international law to grant meaning to derivative primary institutions like notions of the illegitimacy of genocide and war crimes. There is no necessary requirement that master primary institutions line up philosophically. In fact, it may well be rather unlikely for them to do so. It would seem uncontroversial to note that they do not at present. Their constitutive roles introduce many of the tensions, dilemmas, contradictions, and frictions of international relations, when competing and irreconcilable constitutive institutions pull in different directions in the face of events and circumstances which the same institutions grant different levels and types of significance. Derivative primary institutions, alluded to earlier, are those stable patterns of behaviour that provide the regulatory backbone of international society (Buzan 2004, 176–90). They are derivative from the master institutions in that how shared understandings of basic social practices are constituted has substantial implications for patterns of behaviour that follow from them. For example, it would be difficult to have the market as a master primary institution and then not see free trade as a derivate primary institution providing a (de)regulatory practice. At the same time, equality of people and environmental stewardship, to cite two of Buzan’s (2004, 187) master primary institutions, introduce a check on the logic of the market that creates a tension all too routinely played out in international society in arenas such as labour rights and sustainable development.

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Secondary institutions—the formal organizations and regimes that coordinate and operationalize the regulatory principles—are something of a Cinderella in Buzan’s analysis of institutions, a status that is probably common throughout most English school work. This is a potentially significant problem because it is through such institutions that the members of international society often seek to resolve the differences and conflicts thrown up by the lack of philosophical consistency and coherence characteristic of international society. Given the emphasis on social practice that is such an important feature of English school theory, the conduct of these debates and discussions is a crucial source of evidence for monitoring and mapping the state of play of various master and derivative primary institutions as they rise and fall. This is not to say that English school scholars have neglected the study of secondary institutions entirely, but they have not necessarily been addressed within this overall framework of thinking about institutions as a whole. For example, a crucial English school study of humanitarian intervention, Wheeler’s Saving Strangers (2000), draws extensively on detailed study of the debates within the UN Security Council across a quarter of a century or so about how the international community should respond to humanitarian crises. As Wheeler demonstrates, some of the arguments put forward in his Cold War examples (Cambodia, East Pakistan/Bangladesh, and Uganda) (Wheeler 2000, 55–138) had essentially lost traction by the mid 1990s. This is evidence of how secondary institutions serve as bell weathers for the relationships between master primary institutions, and the role they play in developing derivative primary institutions. They also need to be understood in terms of how they act as conduits of discursive change in those primary institutions and mechanisms for assessing the basis upon which those institutions are engaged with by members of international society. That recalls the discussion of assessing change in Chapter 3 and my emphasis on the inadmissibility of previously potent arguments as importance evidence of normative change. It also, I suggest, chimes with Hurrell’s (2013) claims about the resurgent analytical significance of traditional pluralism in understanding the rejection by BRIC states (Brazil, Russia, India, and China) of the challenge to non-intervention mounted by a number of leading Western liberal states in the 1990s and early 2000s. This is a pointer to a last, but critical, observation about institutions that needs to be addressed before I move on to consider the normative dynamics in play and how it is that an approach to institutions focused upon an international society of states can be used to think about a world politics of communities. Most English school theory tends to work on the basis of an assumption that institutions are internalized by participants—that is that they abide by most of the rules most of the time because they accept that abiding by 123

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those rules and respecting the status of other members of the institutions is the right thing to do. They are legitimate, in the sense raised briefly earlier but discussed in detail by Ian Clark (2005). Where those institutions are in part constitutive of the actors—they play a crucial part in giving the actors status and meaning—this may well be a reasonable assumption to make. But, of course, institutions do a great deal more than that and they throw up dilemmas, challenges, and contradictions actors have to face all the time, including even threats to actors’ own sense of their nature and existence. Following Wendt (1999), Buzan (2004, 139–60) proposes that the English school should instead understand compliance through three different mechanisms: coercion, calculation, or consent. The character of institutions is affected by the extent to which actors comply with their stipulations on the basis of one or other of these three motivations. Buzan uses this to reformulate the ‘pluralist-solidarist’ debate. Pluralism describes the strength and durability of an international society that is very limited in the extent of the behaviour that it effectively regulates and where that is reliant principally on coercion. Solidarism describes an extensive range of effective regulatory rules and secondary institutions whose value is the result of consent on the part of actors. They mark the empirical endpoints of a spectrum of international society, rather than normatively opposed and irreconcilable visions of that society, such that international society as ‘a bit of both’ is coherent. This tripartite account of compliance with the expectations of institutions is of necessity an analytically useful simplification. Actual instances of decisionmaking processes will highlight the mixture of reasons that are involved in compliance with or derogation from institutional expectations. However, the important part of the argument here is that these three accounts are sufficient to enable me to get to grips with the question of institutional compliance. They are also helpful for starting to think about a distinctive pluralist approach to institutions because they are open to the challenge of multiple institutional locations which has been a feature of the argument so far and point to the way in which actors are pulled in different directions by their differently understood commitments to comply with institutionally located obligations. It also calls for enquiry into why some may reject institutionally legitimated courses of action at all—why some may resist.

Pluralism and ‘Subaltern Institutions’ The values that are typically seen as granting normative validity to the institutions of international society are almost invariably positive ones. Even where the ‘non-ideal’ nature of international society is accepted in, for instance, the traditional pluralist privileging of interstate order over interhuman justice, the 124

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contrast is drawn between the superiority of order over chaos (Williams 2006). Buzan (2004, 86) is one of the few to acknowledge the necessity of seeing transnational criminal activity, for instance, as being a component of a transnational dimension of world politics; as much a part of the social structure of globalization as more benign transnational groupings like environmental or feminist movements. Yet the idea of the institutions of international society being governed by values such as repression, injustice, and racial discrimination, to name but a few possible candidates, is not countenanced. The English school has a tendency to see the institutions it portrays as central to international society as being, on the whole, benign. Buzan self-consciously sets aside this question, stressing the pragmatic necessity for his project of discounting the normative character of institutions in pursuit of analytical precision. The ethical desirability of institutions is a question he calls on others to take up (Buzan 2004, 228–9; Williams 2011). This is one of the reasons, perhaps, why the English school does not have a highly developed place in self-consciously critical approaches to international relations. Amongst major figures whose work engages explicitly with the English school tradition, Andrew Linklater stands out as being the principal author who has worked across both the English school and critical theory. Linklater’s work over thirty years has been seminal in the development of Habermasian thinking in IR and in promoting cosmopolitan standards of justice in IR theory (key papers are collected in Linklater 2007). His work on concepts like good international citizenship has been influential on other English school cosmopolitans and his most recent discussions of cosmopolitan harm conventions, drawing on historical sociology, have furthered the sociological dimension of the English school in ways that add substantially to the sophistication of the concepts and the normative power of the cosmopolitan argument (Linklater 2011). They serve to highlight the repressive and racist dimensions of international society’s institutions, reiterating the centrality of normativity to those institutions. For Linklater, normativity is an inescapable aspect of any institution, and certainly the way in which Buzan sees institutions as constituted by and of values lends further weight to the Habermasian stress on inherent normativity (Williams 2011). Habermasian discourse ethics and an account of harm indebted to Norbert Elias (Linklater 2007, 2011) both offer openings to a more critical perspective on international society and the English school project more generally. Both certainly deploy levels of philosophical and sociological sophistication that are absent from classic English school texts and offer a basis for serious normative theory about the nature of universality. They point towards the centrality of the human individual to ethics in world politics, appealing for recognition of the ethical significance of all humans through their possession of universal characteristics and needs. I want to offer an alternative to these 125

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conclusions, although from a starting point that accepts some of the same premises: the need to look at world politics, not international relations, and the need to recognize and accept universal characteristics and needs. In this case, those are the now familiar claims about the universality of plurality and the need for community. These point towards a somewhat different critical perspective, one neglected in English school theory. The idea of the subaltern view draws on the claim that if one really wants to understand how a social structure works then one needs to look at it from the perspective of those who gain the least from the established order: those who are its victims and who struggle against it. The notion of ‘subaltern studies’ as a self-conscious intellectual movement has its roots in a reassessment and reformulation of the history and historiography of the Indian sub-continent. This work emerged in the 1980s and has been influential ever since (e.g. Guha and Spivak 1988). Drawing on the development of the idea of the ‘subaltern’ by Antonio Gramsci (Arnold 2000)—a key figure in the intellectual origins of critical approaches to international relations via the work of Robert Cox (1981)—the idea emerged of retelling sub-continental history from the perspective of those excluded by both the imperialist discourse of the British Raj and the bourgeois nationalist history of the independence movement and its leaders (Guha 1988a, 37–9). Subaltern studies stimulated a range of historical work, ultimately stretching beyond the sub-continent, and played a substantial role in the emergence of post-colonial perspectives reflecting the move away from the self-consciously Marxist historiography of the initial work to draw increasingly on many of the same intellectual origins as post-structuralism in IR, including Foucault, Deleuze, and Barthes (Chaturvedi 2000, xi–xii; Spivak 1988). Some critics of this move, notably O’Scanlon and Washbrook (2000) feel that the abandonment of a Marxist tone in favour of a post-structural one in the late 1980s and 1990s damaged the ability of subaltern studies to offer a compelling narrative and insightful analysis of the reasons for the weakness of the subaltern and to fully understand the location and value of subaltern discourse within wider systems of production. My scepticism about following the subaltern studies move towards a post-structuralist stance is connected to concerns about the compatibility of that perspective with retention of a normative focus that self-consciously seeks to avoid relativism. Concerns expressed by, for example, Tarik Kochi (2009, 8–12) over the extent to which post-structuralism, especially that principally indebted to Foucault and Barthes, can ultimately avoid a relativist position in which ethics have to be understood as power structures, parallel my own to a substantial extent. This is not to reject the analytical insight and critical power of post-structural post-colonial work, but it is to suggest that the earlier, more Marxist and Gramscian, subaltern studies perspective is more methodologically suited to 126

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this project and for this reason serves as the principal source for my discussion of subalternity, resistance, and institutions in this chapter. What ties all of this work together, in so much as such a generalization risks misrepresentation, is the enduring insight of the subaltern claim: the need to look at social orders from the perspective of those at the bottom in order to challenge those at the top and to ensure that the voices of the weak, silenced, and marginalized can be heard, valued, and respected. This is crucial to a revived pluralism and offers an insightful and critical perspective for thinking about institutions in a way that challenges the dominant discourse. It gives us an account of institutions that challenges the ‘establishment’ perspective that dominates the English school, loading the analytical and normative dice in favour of established institutions largely on the basis of their being established. The methodological complexities of recovering perspectives and voices that were frequently unrecorded, or certainly unreliably recorded, by elites, and the philosophical challenges of the subaltern perspective are not issues that I address here (for discussion see, e.g. O’Scanlon and Washbrook 2000; Spivak 1988). What is particularly important, though, is the way in which the subaltern studies agenda emphasizes the necessity of engaging with the perspective of the weak on the terms set by the weak. Alongside the critique of the colonial historiography that denies the agency of the subjugated, seeing them as pawns or as primitives, lies a critique of radical historiography that sees the subjugated as located on a trajectory towards a full awareness of their situation that will enable them to throw off traditional and religious belief systems and liberate themselves through secular rationality (Guha 1988a, 1988b, 71–84). This similarly denies the agency of the subjugated, and it is in respecting and seeking to engage with the realty of the lived experience and the value of the perspective of the subaltern that subaltern perspectives seek to re-establish the agency of the subjugated. That chimes well with the spirit of a revived pluralism, as discussed in these pages, and also contributes to the critique of conventional pluralism which can, indeed, be elitist, even patrician, in tone, and which can be sceptical of the significance of culturally distinctive perspectives on the operations and institutions of international society. It also builds on the English school’s insistence on the importance of history to theory, but that insistence has failed to engage with historiographical questions that subaltern studies consistently emphasize (for an exception see Bain 2009). The Indian peasantry’s struggles against the colonialism of the Raj are a long way from the usual concerns of the English school, but the subaltern perspective has an echo in the way in which cultural dissemination is usually seen by English school work as being one-way traffic, from a European elite to non-European societies, so that they can be assimilated to and participate in the practices of 127

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international society on a basis conducive to the European elite (Kayaoglu 2010). Discussion of the methodology of a revived pluralism in Chapters 1 and 2 is worth recalling and elaborating a little at this point, because it helps to explain why a revived pluralism does not end up looking like something very similar to Linklater’s project, especially that which receives its clearest statement in The Transformation of Political Community (1998). Crucial here is the critique of discourse ethics mounted by Nancy Fraser (1990) and the concept of the subaltern counterpublic. This serves to highlight tendencies within Habermasian-inspired discourse ethics projects to assume the possibility of ideal speech situations, or comparable discursive moments, such that rational interlocutors will reach agreement on core principles. These, it turns out, will look quite a lot like liberalism. Fraser, and I, are sceptical about this process for a number of reasons, including the extent to which it matches any sort of real-world encounter and the ways in which it is constructed that appear to rationalize or deny dynamics of exclusion. The forms of permissible speech and knowledge mean that certain ethical conclusions are almost predetermined. Another key source discussed in this regard, Seyla Benhabib, seems to have a similar problem. In The Claims of Culture (2002, 40), Benhabib outlines the limits of culturally permissible ethical diversity through considering how culture relates to the ‘moral’, the ‘ethical’, and the ‘evaluative’. These categories appear in a hierarchical relationship, such that ‘the moral concerns what is right or just for all insofar as we are considered simply as human beings; the ethical, which concerns what is appropriate for us insofar as we are members of a specific collectivity . . . ; and the evaluative, which concerns what we individually or collectively hold to be valuable’. This is couched in an account of intercultural discourse which sees the process of dialogue gradually ensuring that the moral—that is, the universally human—comes to be something of a trump card. That, at least to me, seems to face two problems, which I would argue also apply to Linklater’s account, although to a different extent. The first is Fraser’s critique of the Habermasian account: the way in which the discourse is set up predetermines the outcome by loading the dice in favour of the universal, human, ‘moral’ good as providing the non-derogable normative bedrock. The second is that it seems to assume a somewhat empirically implausible account of globalization as working to expand and bring about the willing internalization of universal ‘moral’ ideas that change cultural ‘ethics’ accordingly. That has two questions to answer: where is the evidence that cultures are not resisting—often vigorously, even violently—globalization dynamics that are perceived as challenging fundamental ethical claims made by cultures; and second, where is the evidence that individuals are members of a single culture such that a hierarchy can be understood in such straightforward terms? The claim of a revived pluralism is that neither question is 128

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answered satisfactorily, resulting in a much more complex and difficult position. Resistance to globalizing, universalizing ethical discourse is not trivial, as I show below and in Chapter 5; and accepting the claim that people are members of multiple communities means that responses to normative argument are complex and filtered through different sorts of, in Benhabib’s terms, ‘moral’ and ‘ethical’ lenses. These two problems are classic elements of the subaltern critique. The first finds clear reflection in Chakrabarty’s (1998, 266–8) analysis of the assumptions of universality and an ability to produce absolute theoretical insights uniquely reserved for European-originated theory, such that non-European theoretical enterprises can only ever achieve more practical knowledge. Consequently, historical accounts of India unavoidably stress the extent to which Indian society and politics have fallen short of completing a journey towards ideals that are unavoidably rooted in the unique, absolute theory of Europe. This leads Chakrabarty (1998, 284, 290) to pessimistic conclusions about the possibility of escaping European subjectivity written into the very concept of history and a politics of despair over the repression that such history and subjectivity must inevitably engender. The triumph of Benhabib’s universal ‘morals’ over culturally specific and inferior ‘ethics’ does not hold out the hope of emancipation for non-European subjects. The second issue is reflected in the subaltern awareness of the immense difficulty of gaining access to evidence of the subaltern experience because of the lack of recorded evidence, its emplacement within dominant discursive structures, and the rejection of the validity of subaltern experiences as presenting meaningful insight into the political condition. I have already considered how the assimilative portrayal of the expansion of international society creates problems for the English school’s understanding of culture (Buzan 2010b). This is, though, being challenged. For example, one of the most interesting, and important, aspects of the recent engagement of Chinese scholars with English school theory has been the emphasis some place upon Confucianism, not as some sort of add-on or modifier of how Chinese political elites see international society, but as essential to the way in which China operates within and seeks to develop international society. Dismissing Chinese discourse in relation to sovereignty and non-intervention as a self-serving cultural disguise to protect the interests of a one-party state with serious human rights issues is misguided, although not necessarily always inaccurate in specific instances. There may be elements of that in some cases, but it is unwise to assume that Chinese political elites understand international society in the same ways as Europeans and North Americans do and that claims to the contrary are a cynical pretence. China is arguably no longer a subaltern power. The radicalism of the Maoist vision of, in particular, the Cultural Revolution, is long in the past. A subaltern 129

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analysis of China as a state would also have a great deal to say about the role of Confucianism as a political discourse within Chinese society, I suspect, and the conservative, authoritarian, and repressive uses to which it can be put, especially in relation to groups who do not share a Confucian perspective. Nevertheless, these non-Western perspectives on a theoretical tradition in international relations that has previously not travelled beyond the European and North American heartlands of IR theory to any great extent are valuable reminders of, and potential initial gateways to, the development of subalternity as an aspect of English school thinking, and a distinctly pluralist one, too. Seeing international society as a Confucian phenomenon is to see it very differently. Seeing the co-option of institutions associated with a European tradition of thought by a non-European tradition is to see them very differently. Tarik Kochi (2009) has provided a wide-ranging account and defence of a subaltern approach to thinking normatively about international relations, and particularly about war. The key point to elaborate here is that the subaltern view has the potential to reinvigorate a pluralist account of the English school because of the way in which it brings to the fore viewpoints that are usually silenced and enables us to think much more actively about the excluded and minority community perspectives that pluralism needs to capture. Crucially, that means communities that are not manifested in states, or for which statism is alien, inappropriate, or the target of their resistance. This approach is in contrast to the best-known previous effort to establish a subaltern position in international relations: Mohammad Ayoob’s concept of ‘subaltern realism’ (2002). Ayoob’s position is interesting, although ultimately unhelpful for this project, because of the way in which he seeks to retain the centrality of the state in international relations—the ‘realism’ bit of the label— and yet to reinterpret international society from the perspective of the weak, post-colonial states. Ayoob (2002, 31–3) acknowledges a debt to the English school in his argument, seeing the notion of an international society as being an important contributing factor to the potential created by his subaltern realist perspective. Certainly, his argument about the centrality of the state to a post-decolonization world and the ways in which the post-colonial state leaderships have used key institutions of international society as ways to establish and defend their positions offers an interesting account of how European understandings of those institutions have been altered. The analytical conclusions Ayoob (2002, 39–48) reaches are more in tune with the traditional pluralism I am so sceptical about. Maintenance of a statist, sovereignty-fixated international order is necessary and desirable because it is in the best interests of the weak states. It creates important institutional bulwarks against the dangers of resurgent imperialism and creates possibilities for the weak to control the strong in a long-term shifting of the international order towards one in which post-colonial political perspectives and views are 130

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better able to fulfil their ambitions. The statism of Ayoob’s subaltern realism is the key problem from my perspective, and for some of the same reasons that it is a key weakness of traditional pluralism. Ayoob neglects hugely important non-state sources of world politics, such as economic globalization and the transformatory effects of technological innovation on social, political, and economic participation and exclusion. Ayoob’s account also assumes that stronger states are better states, despite the role that strong states play in repression and discrimination—the notions of ‘fierce states’ found in some Middle Eastern studies is an exemplar (e.g. Ayubi 1995). His subaltern perspective sees the weak states reforming the established international society and altering the regulatory rules and secondary institutions, but not transforming the master and derivative primary institutions. From the perspective of this project, the opportunity presented by a subaltern perspective is to establish pluralism as a source of and framework for critique of those primary institutions. To do this from a perspective that is not essentially statist is far more in tune with what I take to be the key normative claim of the subaltern literature: the moral perspective of the weak is more valid than that of the strong and its silencing and marginalization must be challenged. The state elites of the less developed countries are still elites. The subaltern perspective comes not from them, as it did not come from the bourgeois nationalist Indian elites that provide the second target, after the Raj, for sub-continental subaltern historiography (Guha 1988a). As well as providing a mechanism for escaping the restrictions of only focusing on the established locations of institutional authority, engaging with a subaltern approach unveils previously unconsidered patterns of social activity and marginalized or ignored communities engaged in struggles against the dominant, institutionally legitimized actors. This, too, is a commonplace in subaltern and postcolonial work, where indigenous peoples, for example, offer a rich and rewarding source of examples of challenges to mainstream practices (Chaturvedi 2000; Guha and Spivak 1988). This perspective clearly establishes a substantial challenge for the analysis of institutions within English school theory because of the way in which it seeks to destabilize the typically normatively positive account of established institutions. It helpfully reinforces Buzan’s point about the need for open-mindedness about which institutions we include as constitutive of international society, recognizing that there is a ‘dark side’ to social practice (Buzan 2004, 84). Granting the subaltern view of institutions is therefore one way of incorporating this aspect of a revived pluralist project, but without the normative pre-judgement ‘dark side’ implies. However, the problem goes much deeper than that, because it also asks questions about the existence of distinctively subaltern primary institutions, both master and derivative, in international society. This is not a claim about a 131

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parallel institutional structure or structures, because the idea of parallelism is, of course, that the components never intersect. That is the exact opposite of the sort of institutional phenomena I am seeking to capture here. A revived pluralism’s openness to the subaltern, though, enables the portrayal of a richer institutional world than that revealed by conventional English school scholarship because it can identify additional master and derivative primary institutions, and because it is better able to highlight the normative significance of both institutions and their interactions. Key to this is the addition of ‘resistance’ to the list of master primary institutions. This goes further than the observation already made that some actors abide by the rules and norms of international society because they fear the coercive consequences of not doing so. Instead, it is to recognize that there are actors who seek to resist incorporation into the institutions of international society because of the way in which its constitutive and regulatory effects are inimical to their self-understandings of their own identity through the way in which it excludes or marginalizes the social practices that are key to their constitution as social actors. ‘Resistance’ as a master primary institution aims to capture the normative dimension of this rejection of the established order of international society, as well as to provide an analytical category that recognizes resistance as being more than the flip-side of compliance with the established order. This is something that, I feel, Buzan’s analytical reworking of English school categories cannot achieve because of the way that he uses the ‘flip-side’ or ‘dark-side’ mechanism to recognize the ‘contribution’ to world politics made by drug smugglers, people traffickers, terrorists, and so on. These activities are framed as being ‘deviance’ because they utilize institutions and associated behaviours in order to achieve outcomes at odds with the social goods embedded in the justification of the institutions. Such activity will inevitably suffer in any normative assessment against instances of compliance where the analytical structure is constructed in order to reflect the assumptions of those who comply. On the whole we should, indeed, see the kinds of activities Buzan picks up as being the ‘dark side’ of master institutions like the market as ‘deviance’. They are not, though, instances of ‘resistance’. ‘Resistance’, instead, seeks to establish a category that is open to social practices and actors seeking to reject the established order in ways that are distinct from noncompliance with conventional understandings and that does not carry such a risk of normative pre-judgement. Rather, resistance offers a means of categorizing and analysing political activity by the weak that seeks to overturn, subvert, sidestep, and bypass the established institutions of world politics in pursuit of the empowerment of the weak and the creation of alternative political orders. This is an ‘institution’ because it captures durable social practices: whether that be the accounts of 132

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resistance offered by the subaltern studies collective’s work on the Indian peasantry under the British Raj, or the Occupy movement in contemporary capitalism. Resistance, as these examples suggest, occurs with different intensities and at different scales, so that we do not have to only assess those projects for a different global order to replace international society. More important is the use of alternative political narratives to resist incorporation into the logics and categories of the established international society. As Kayaoglu (2010) suggests, one of the consequences of an overly dominant, and historically suspect, Westphalian narrative is that it tends to produce accounts that see practices that do not comply with ‘Westphalianism’ as evidence of cultural inferiority that will be overcome by eventual socialization into conventional norms. Resistance to such socialization based on nonacceptance of the cultural superiority of established norms and the propagation of alternative political institutions, practices, and normative visions is at the heart of resistance as an institution of international society. This echoes one of the key claims of the subaltern studies group’s earliest writings—that the history of the Indian sub-continent has been told exclusively in terms of either the Raj and its colonial elite, or the bourgeois nationalist elite. The ‘ordinary’ Indians are ignored and excluded because they are assumed to be passive. Resistance therefore fulfils the criteria of an institution: resistance to dominant discourse and practice is a durable and evolved social practice; and resistance is constitutive of actors’ self-understanding and regulates their behaviour. Similarly, it interacts with other primary institutions in ways that enable understanding, analysis, and assessment of the nature and significance of political behaviour. In contrast to deviance, however, resistance offers a distinct and separate account of social, political, and economic order from the dominant perspective. It holds out a vision and version of how durable social practice in relation to basic questions can produce different answers to those that frame established debate. As with the portrayal of the sub-continental peasantry under colonial rule, the maintenance of traditional practices, beliefs, and behaviour need not be seen as passivity or a throwback to a social order being swept away by modernity, but as manifestations of accounts of the good life dearly held by a community aiming to subvert and bypass practice that operates on incompatible premises, scales, and time frames they seek to reject. Such alternative, subaltern visions of social practice need not necessarily hark back to times gone by, although they sometimes do. The institution of resistance, as with institutions like the market or human rights, can encompass a range of forms of behaviour, but where that functional differentiation is undergirded by a unifying rejection of dominant discourses of appropriate political order and normative standards. That unification comes about 133

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through offering a reasonably coherent account of alternative political and social order, even though that may appeal to radically different accounts of space, scale, and even time from those that characterize and cross the establishment institutions that are the focus of English school theory. As with all primary institutions of international society, resistance is entangled with the other institutions and the same activity may be analysed through the lenses provided by those different institutions, helping us grasp the complexity of both the activity itself and the kinds of political challenges that it poses. Resistance adds a way of capturing political activity that seeks to define itself in ways that are overlooked by, or are self-consciously in opposition to, conventional political categories. Pluralism should seek to reflect the multitude and diversity of communities that human beings belong to, often simultaneously, and from which they gain value. That includes the necessity of a proper appreciation of the distinctiveness of resistance, separating it from deviance. Importantly, this approach avoids the efforts to establish diametrically opposed notions of ‘Western’ and ‘non-Western’ IR because it emphasizes the interpenetration of institutions. As Pinar Bilgin (2008) notes, and in line with the efforts to revise the Eurocentric historical accounts of culture in international society noted in Chapter 3 (e.g. Buzan 2010b; Hobson 2004, 2012a), what is Western and non-Western in thinking about international relations is far from clear cut and hermetically compartmentalized. Resistance need not take the form of radical rejection—the sort of vision of a world order that is sometimes associated with a group like al-Qaeda, whereby almost everything that is normatively privileged in the current international society would be swept away—such that a stark normative choice is left between irreconcilable and hostile visions (Elshtain 2004). Some, but probably not many, such visions exist (and whether al-Qaeda is a viable empirical example is not a claim either accepted or refuted here). Neither does it fall into a teleological trap that assumes that assimilation to a specific set of norms is inescapable (Fukuyama 1989), or that violent clashes are the eventual, inevitable outcome of the decline of Western hegemony (Huntington 1996). Resistance as a primary institution has a further advantage of aiding the historical analysis of international societies and their developments, as it enables analysis of how certain types of resistance have been characterized and written into, and out of, the narratives that dominate historical and, by their omission, ahistorical strands of IR. Thus, for instance, reconsidering the narrative story of the expansion of international society is aided by an assessment of resistance that does not treat it as a largely tragic account of doomed failure on the part of those steamrollered into modernity by European expansion. As discussed in Chapter 2, narrative is a crucial part of the methodological reformulation of pluralism that underpins this effort to revive the 134

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pluralist cause, so it is appropriate that it remains prominent in my account of and additions to the notion of institutions. This notion also brings us back to Wilson’s (2012) appeal for a practice-based account of institutions, but in a way that highlights the limitations of his project. The practice Wilson identifies as providing the empirical basis for establishing an effective concept of institutions in English school theory is exclusively elite practice. His grounded theory is grounded in ‘an “insider” understanding of what those professionally or otherwise intimately involved in IR conceive to be the role, importance, value and potential for progressive change of institutions’ (Wilson 2012, 586). He elaborates the idea of ‘professional or intimate involvement’ only implicitly, but Wilson’s (2012, 587) list of those whose understanding should be subject to sustained and detailed investigation includes ‘particular foreign service departments, particular groups of international civil servants, or gatherings of particular international fora’. Our ability to conduct the necessary historical comparative studies can rely on ‘extant texts—historical documents, memoirs, personal papers, and the like’ (Wilson 2012, 587). As the historiography of subaltern studies stresses, such documentary sources are unlikely to adequately reflect the lived experience of the poor and repressed. Certainly, Wilson’s account of how we should analyse institutions from a practice-based, grounded theory perspective makes no mention of the practice of the subaltern. One advantage of a ‘stipulative’ approach is that it can selfconsciously seek to include in our assessment of institutions the perspectives and the practices those institutions exclude, and this is an opportunity pluralism ought to seize. The normative benefits of doing so are significant. The next stage in this assessment is to look at how these revisions alter an account of institutions; how the development of a subaltern perspective and the initiation of the concept of resistance as an additional master primary institution changes analysis of a political phenomenon. Looking at a central institution of international society—war—and one that is the subject of substantial contemporary normative debate in response to changing patterns and practices of violence is a good place to start. This will also serve as a gateway to some consideration of political economy, an aspect of world politics traditional pluralism is woefully poor at understanding.

Operationalizing Pluralism and the Normativity of Institutions War is a political problem that is central to international relations as both practice and academic endeavour. Seeking to restrain the circumstances under which a specified and limited range of actors may have legitimate recourse to large-scale and systematic violence, and the ways in which that violence is conducted, are central to the English school analysis of war as an institution. 135

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Fears of unrestrained war—all against all, or via indiscriminate and massively destructive means—are also at the core of the Hobbesian alternative against which international society offers protection. A radically violent world, where violence is available as a political tool to all and where weapons and tactics are unrestricted, is a commonplace of post-apocalyptic visions of what a world that really has gone to hell in a handcart would look like. The post-Cold War debates over ‘new wars’, ‘asymmetric wars’, and the like reflect the sense that an era—albeit a remarkably brief one of a few decades at best—of ‘conventional war’ has passed (e.g. Kaldor 1999; van Creveld 1991). Such wars were ostensibly fought between states for limited and defined policy objectives, fought by uniformed and disciplined armed forces, and fought in some accordance with notions of discrimination and proportionality. The central position of the state in this Clausewitzian paradigm is one of the key points at issue in the debates over novel and asymmetric violence. Non-state actors have always had recourse to political violence and their loss of an ostensibly legitimate claim to such tools is comparatively recent. Its loss has, however, been almost total. The idea of non-state actors as fighting ‘wars’, in a proper sense of the term, is excluded by definition because of the way that the institution of war is assumed to be an element of international society and only states can be members of such a society. One way of thinking about how this exclusion of non-state actors from the institution of war can be used to open up an examination of how this revived pluralist account of institutions may work is by looking at the delegitimation of war by non-state actors. The starting place for this examination may not be an obvious one. The ideal, and idealized, account of the institution of war in conventional pluralist accounts stands in close proximity, in terms of the normative significance it attaches to war, to the most influential modern account of just war theory. Michael Walzer’s Just and Unjust Wars (2006 [1977]) may have received a less than flattering review from Hedley Bull (1979a), but his book has been hugely influential and his account of the historical development, negotiation, and renegotiation of the jus ad bellum and jus in bello principles through state practice, negotiation, and law making has many clear parallels with the English school. Walzer’s wider work on international ethics in Thick and Thin (1994) also sits relatively easily alongside a traditional pluralist account of international society. These commonalities help get at the problems with the traditional pluralist account of the institution of war in terms of a revived pluralist normative agenda. Key to this is the way in which the state becomes the normative centrepiece of Walzer’s account, as it is of traditional pluralism. This is shown through a consideration of one of the best-known, and most controversial, aspects of Walzer’s (2006 [1977], 251–68) analysis of just war—his

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defence of the potential, if exceptional, permissibility of unrestricted targeting by states under conditions of ‘supreme emergency’. Walzer’s ‘supreme emergency’ exception to the rules of proportionality and discrimination in the conduct of war is intriguing. Walzer argues that there may be circumstances in which a state would be justified in using disproportionate and indiscriminate force if there are no other plausible options for maintaining its survival in the face of a threat whose triumph would be an ethical disaster, not only in the destruction of the threatened state but for civilization as a whole. His example is the situation faced by Britain after the fall of France in June 1940 when it opposed Nazi Germany alone. Regardless of the historical suitability of Walzer’s example for the task, Coady (2004a) has argued persuasively that the restriction of the supreme emergency exemption from the rules of proportionality and discrimination is one that ought not, logically, to be restricted to states if it is to be allowed at all. Coady’s argument is that the way out of this is to remove the exception entirely—there are no bases upon which indiscriminate and disproportionate tactics may be used within a war. The point that matters here is the power of his claim that Walzer simply takes for granted the inapplicability of the exemption to non-state forms of political community and that there is no logical reason why other forms of political community could not be included in the argument. Resistance against catastrophic domination should be available to all political communities, or none. This challenge to a statist account of political authority in relation to war has, in fact, become something of a theme of contemporary just war theory (for a survey of contemporary thinking on authority in the just war tradition see Lang et al. 2013). Cecile Fabre (2008) has perhaps gone furthest in arguing that within liberal political theory the idea of the state as the possessor of legitimate authority is, essentially, indefensible. Fabre argues that authority to go to war rests with every individual because of the way in which liberalism reserves to the individual the right to defend themselves against the oppressive state and that the judgement as to what counts as oppression must ultimately rest with individuals. Fabre’s argument is counterintuitive, but that is simply a reflection of its striking novelty rather than a defence of socially embedded intuitions in relation to complex arguments. Certainly, sub-state actors have been seen as possessing legitimate rights to violent resistance in conflicts such as anti-colonial national liberation struggles, a framing that many organizations have sought, and continue to seek, to use in order to legitimize political violence.3 That has become detached from the

3 Another illustrative instance may be the use of the language of ‘crusades’ by Islamic groups in relation to Western military action. This serves to delegitimize Western action and legitimize violent resistance.

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form of colonialism that was its original target, with a whole host of practices, from economic liberalization to cultural globalization, from human rights activism to scientific rationalism, portrayed as ‘neo-colonial’, with the implication that violent resistance may thus be legitimate. That this should be an individual right, and that such resistance is a legitimate example of war, is a further instance of the way in which the notion of resistance can inform accounts of institutions that are unsettling of the status quo, but which draw on the viewpoint of the oppressed to subvert the conventional normative claim. Insurgency against occupation provides a further contemporary example, and a second derivative primary institution to set alongside national liberation struggles, of circumstances where subaltern accounts see violence as plausibly legitimate. The complexity, if not outright incoherence, of the notion of occupation and of the obligations owed by subjects of occupation to their occupiers is effectively highlighted by Peter Stirk (2009). His account helps point towards the way in which the idea of being an ‘occupied people’ living in an ‘occupied territory’ establishes an example of disempowerment that can be extreme and a rallying point for resistance that may overcome other political, social, or economic divisions. Resisting the occupation in any way at all; from the seemingly petty and trivial to the large-scale and violent; offers a narrative of political action that can both unite and divide a community over the acceptability of violence. ‘Rallying around the flag’ is a familiar political theme—there is even an effect named after it in analyses of the extent to which the media and other political groups back off from criticizing foreign policy once troops are committed (e.g. Hetherington and Nelson 2003)—and also a double-edged one. Those who do not rally are fifth columnists, traitors, pacifists, and so on, and thus likely to be subject to coercion and exclusion. That is a useful reminder of the dangers of reifying insurgents and of reading into insurgencies a cohesiveness and homogeneity of values that they may not possess. Insurgency as the twenty-first-century equivalent of the radical chic that made a poster boy out of Ché Guevara carries risks. Nevertheless, the very idea of insurgency has become associated with subaltern resistance through its emphasis on the use, by the weak, of whatever tactical advantages they can claim in fighting against technologically, economically, and organizationally privileged actors. As with resistance to the British Raj and with China’s ‘peaceful rise’ in international society, there is a need for pluralists to listen carefully and closely to the voices of the subaltern, and not to hear what they want to hear. The logic of violent resistance is a potentially dangerous one. Coady’s (2004a) counsel against the permissibility of any ‘supreme emergency’ exemption is not an example of seeking to deny the means of resistance to the impoverished, dispossessed, and powerless. It is a reminder of the high normative stakes in play once actors resort to systematic and organized 138

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political violence—whoever they are. Such violence is a deeply imprecise and uncertain means of pursuing a community’s vision of justice. It is clearly tempting to resist moves to extend the permissible use of violence in international relations, given the costs of war. ‘Cry “Havoc”, and let slip the dogs of war’ is unlikely to win many establishment friends as a slogan for world order. Yet for some, whose view of the world is radically antiestablishment because of the oppression and violence world order has inflicted upon them, the words Shakespeare gave to Mark Anthony may sound very different. Destroying the bastions of established order and authority, thereby risking unleashing the misery of unrestrained violence, may not be the dark outcome of regicide. Instead it may be seen as offering the only way of destroying a corrupt and irretrievably oppressive order; a necessary precursor to the creation of a new world order that offers a greater chance of true peace and justice, including the justice of inflicting upon the oppressors in some small measure a ‘bitter gulp’ of the medicine they have dispensed in the name of their own vision of order, to borrow a turn of phrase from Churchill. This is hardly unfamiliar in accounts of revolutionary change, particularly accounts of revolution that appeal to a vanguard logic, whether that be a Leninist version or a religious account that sees holy warriors as the elect. A revived pluralism is normatively resistant to such logics, and necessarily so. The politically null character of violence that Arendt (1972) described is a useful reminder of the threat that violence represents to the political vision that animates a revived pluralism. Resistance and vengeance are not synonymous. Arendt’s argument may not be one that I can go along with in its entirety, though, because of the distinctiveness of the character of international society and the extent of the pluralism that it must encompass and the radical difference that is sometimes present. Arendt’s proposition is not a bad starting point, though: exceptional justifications are needed for violent politics and those must come out of an argument that a community is facing the kind of situation that generates an intolerable politics, of the sort discussed in Chapter 2. The possibility of the community’s existence must be being denied by others and that argument must be able to gain traction beyond the supposedly threatened community itself to overcome the dangers of relativistic and self-serving claims to the uniqueness of a communal experience that precludes the possibility of valid judgement by anyone else. That kind of hermetic sealing of community and the singularity of membership are simply implausible and the radical relativism of judgement it requires is inimical to substantive political ethics. An inability to persuade a significant number of others of the merits of your case is, prima facie, evidence of the weakness of that case, not a reason to seek to kill, bomb, and shoot your way to victory (Frost 1996, 160–96). 139

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What needs to be remembered, though, is that the authority to use violence ought not always and necessarily be in the hands of the recognized and established holders of claims to such authority. The conservative tendencies of the English school are noteworthy, especially amongst pluralists, and are understandable given the normative preference for order over chaos and the status of order as normatively prior in most accounts. The construction of English school theory so that the realist, rationalist, and revolutionist tendencies are in constant tension within their varying balance, and the Hobbesian account of realism that dominates discussions, makes it readily apparent why anything that threatens to pitch international society onto a slippery slope to the Hobbesian abyss is to be treated with the gravest suspicion. Institutions as bastions of the maintenance of order do, nevertheless, seriously neglect the transformative potential and alternative normative vision that they can possess, and a preference for what is really existing simply because it is what is really existing is hard to explain in any normatively persuasive fashion. Possession of the assent of the powerful, as in Kissinger’s (1964, 1–6) concept of legitimacy, is insufficient. This is not the best of all possible worlds, which alone could provide such a defence. Political violence, perhaps especially in the form of war with its scale and organization, is a counterintuitive institution, but, as I have tried to show, it is not one that is entirely without arguable merit, given the role it has played in changing world politics. Those changes, of course, have been for the worse more often than they have been for the better and the costs associated with political violence have been staggeringly high, especially as the scale of military violence has increased. Other institutions also, of course, come with their costs and they are just as frequently noted. The market, to pick one that Buzan emphasizes, and the capitalist logic of property and production that comes along with it, has had a beneficial and destructive impact upon the world. The ability of capitalism to generate wealth has granted a proportion of the world’s population living standards and life expectancies that are historically unique in their beneficence. Global wealth has been estimated in 2013 at US$241 trillion, suggesting an average of US$51,600 per adult (Credit Suisse 2013, 4). More generally, declining mortality, especially amongst the very young, and growing productivity has enabled the world’s population to grow very rapidly whilst at the same time reducing the number of people living in absolute poverty. The disparity in the distribution of wealth, though, remains staggering. By region, for example, an average African adult has wealth totalling US$4,929, compared with an average adult wealth in North America of US$296,004 (Credit Suisse 2013, 5). Across population groups, the multiples between rich and poor are even larger: the poorest half of the world’s population (those with wealth of less than US$4,000) own less than 1 per cent of the 140

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world’s wealth, with the richest 10 per cent (wealth above US$75,000) owning 86 per cent; the richest 1 per cent (wealth over US$753,000) own 49 per cent of the wealth (Credit Suisse 2013, 10). Within particular states, wealth inequalities can be even more extreme, with Russia as the most unequal state in the world, setting aside some exceptions where very small populations include one or two extremely wealthy residents. Here 110 people (0.0001 per cent of the 110 million adults) are estimated to own 35 per cent of total wealth (Credit Suisse 2013, 53). These kinds of disparity have massive effects on life chances in terms of access to basic subsistence commodities and social goods such as healthcare and education. Gender disparities continue to be highly persistent, too, reinforcing recent arguments that the English school has neglected gender as an institution of international society (Blanchard 2011), alongside its neglect of the market. Environmental issues associated with the market also generate and exacerbate trends of radical inequality, restating the point about the interrelated nature of the institutions of international society. These observations are, of course, just the tip of the institutional iceberg when it comes to thinking about the market. Again, though, it should sensitize analysis to the significance of anti-capitalist, anti-globalization, and countercultural movements that seek to present a challenge and represent an alternative to the dominant institutional structures and discourses surrounding economic activity. ‘We are the 99%’, to borrow the slogan of the Occupy movement that has been so prominent in the advanced industrialized world since the onset of the 2008 global financial crisis, may not be strictly accurate given the statistics quoted above, but it does seek to capture the sense that established institutional orders must be critically assessed from the perspective of those least advantaged—the 99 per cent of the world’s population that own 51 per cent of its wealth and perhaps especially the 50 per cent owning less than 1 per cent of wealth. Pluralism should be open to such political economy and the normative values that it frequently espouses of equality, localism, accountability, and cultural respect. There is a compelling need for a normative openness to dissent and resistance that pluralism is uniquely placed to provide within English school theory. The methodological reformulation of pluralism developed in Chapter 2 offers a vehicle for that openness because of the way that it replaces an unargued assumption about the privileged position of the state with a plausibly justified assertion of the superior insight available from a perspective predicated on the central role played by community and the normative defence of political action. There remains a necessary empirical recognition of the centrality of certain political forms, actors, institutions, and philosophies, but this is not a cipher for their normative privileging as a matter of course, the risk with Wilson’s (2012) version of a grounded theory of 141

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institutions. We have seen in relation to the notion of state supreme emergency and the suspension of the rules of war, and in terms of wealth distribution, some preliminary examples of how this revived pluralist analysis might play out. Pluralism thus opens a space for critical perspective on institutions. Pluralism’s normative perspective must be one of dissent and critique, based on a commitment to the respect for political action born out of commitment to community and the recognition of the reality and challenge of political dilemmas arising from multiple community memberships and the difficulties of reconciling competing, often deeply held, values. Institutions as a mechanism for the moderation of diversity are in constant danger of co-option, something that is frequently recognized and addressed. There is, therefore, a need to reconstruct the category of institution in English school theory in a way that does not recreate an unhelpful bifurcation between ‘compliance’ with and ‘deviance’ from institutions that reflect the perspective of the established holders of authority, but recognizes that both are products of political action that accretes around highly durable social problems. Warfare as a social institution of violence, the market as a social institution of production, to give the two examples considered (if very briefly) so far, are embedded in and products of social practice that address the challenges of violence and production, organizing and directing behaviour in certain ways and towards certain ends. Dissent, critique, and resistance are ways of understanding alternative engagements with the same social phenomena. Seeking to separate out and categorize resistance as an institutionally distinctive form of response serves the useful purpose of highlighting the alternative conceptualizations, scales, and normative visions that inspire and frame the politics of such movements. This approach avoids the danger of unhelpfully downplaying the similarities that necessarily exist because of the common social phenomena being addressed because of the way that the English school’s account of institutions emphasizes their entanglement. When anti-globalization protesters paralysed the streets of Seattle during the G7 summit in November 1999, they were concerned with and motivated by many of the same issues being addressed inside the conference venue, even if they were taking diametrically opposed views about the best responses to political, social, economic, and environmental challenges arising from globalization (Lang 2005). They were not, to borrow an analogy from artistic criticism designed to highlight the difficulties of cross-media comparison, dancing about architecture. Their protests took a novel form and the coalition that came together to disrupt, resist, protest, and propose alternatives was a novel one at the time, but that novelty does not mean that the phenomena was normatively inferior to the established, dominant discourse being deployed by the official delegations. Understanding the politics of such movements as connected to an institution of resistance invites a more even-handed 142

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normative assessment of the competing perspectives on the phenomena of globalization. It therefore seems strange to bracket such social movements off into a category that lies outside of our discussions of institutions in English school theory, or to see them as deviant. They are a product of a cosmopolitan, non-statist ‘world society’ at odds with the statist discourse of ‘international society’. They are an element of the master primary institution of resistance and its interaction with another master primary institution—the market. A revived pluralist account of institutions is therefore interested in the normative tensions that surround political action organized within the concept of institutions, and the symbiosis between dominance and dissent, compliance and deviance in political action and the ways in which this shapes the normative dynamics of political communities as they seek to pursue political agendas. Sometimes this can take the form of co-opting dominant discourse for dissenting purposes, as Christian Reus-Smit (1999) suggests anti-colonial nationalist movements in states like India were able to do with human rights concepts, for example. That example also points to the way in which those who were once the radical dissenters can become the establishment guardians of a logic they themselves once rejected, as India has become one of the leading sceptics about human rights as a justification for challenging the non-intervention norm in international relations. The subaltern historians also further remind us that the bourgeois nationalists of the Indian independence movement must not be seen as manifesting a singular, ‘Indian’ voice, but a small, privileged, and powerful element of a vastly more complex social reaction to the institution of imperialism on the sub-continent. The co-option of radical ideas for conservative purposes is a path well trodden in international relations, of course, with national self-determination undergoing a similar journey (Hannum 1990). Institutions thus become sites of continuous political contestation over durable questions and today’s radical resisters may be tomorrow’s establishment defenders. Settlement and consensus is always temporary and contingent. And this is so because they are embedded in the flux of community: they are the result of political action and action is never stable, even if it is able to establish some islands of temporary certainty. Instability includes normative instability and the concept of institutions needs to embrace the inescapable reality of normative instability as part of the understanding of institutions, not seeing it as an external critique necessarily arising from another dimension of world politics. Pluralism thus ought to take seriously the English school injunction about the constant interplay of competing perspectives on international society, but in a way that is less normatively loaded in favour of the ‘middle way’ of international society through the privileging of interstate order as a prior value and necessary condition for the attainment of ‘higher’ values (Bull 1977; Williams 2005, 2006). 143

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Tracing the trajectories of normative debates that help to constitute institutions thus becomes a key element of the operationalization of a revived pluralist research agenda. Understanding and assessing shifts in the constellations of normative perspectives around these highly durable social questions and the ways in which certain claims have achieved their relative status within the current institutional constellation offers a way of getting to empirical grips with the relative fortunes of competing normative claims. This includes tracking the successes and failures of resistance to dominant institutional understandings. This is not only interesting because of the way that it re-emphasizes the inherent connection between normative and empirical research, but also because of the way that it has the potential to expose the subaltern critique in the constitution of institutions. A revived pluralism thus sensitizes analysis to the subaltern critique of established secondary institutions, like the International Monetary Fund and the UN, and the ways in which they condition and shape practice in international society, alongside the deeper critique that pluralism offers of the master institutions of international society because of the way that they privilege dominant, usually statist, political communities. That is a significant benefit of a revived pluralist position, as most analyses of patterns of critique in international relations are rarely well attuned to achieving both of these tasks simultaneously. This account of pluralism has staked a claim to do a plausible job in this regard. The discussion of the impact of international society on the nature, form, and political purpose of community elaborated in Chapter 3 helps understanding of how the practices of derivative primary institutions shape the way in which community takes place as a verb, if an admittedly stylistically clumsy one, in line with the emphasis on the importance of narrative in enabling analysis to make sense of our situation and that of others around us and with whom we interact. It is possible to tell insightful and analytically powerful stories about the forms of community that have been winners and losers in international society and how the ways in which people in ‘community’, in the verb sense, are reflective of the dynamics that are induced, rewarded, and punished through these institutions. At the same time, pluralism can provide a normative judgement about master institutions like sovereignty or the market because of its embedding and defence of the centrality of community to its political vision. There may not be a foundational claim about the ‘perfect’ political order that best facilitates the development of ideal political communities, because pluralism does not possess such a vision, but it does have a clear preference for political orders that are open, tolerant, and dynamic over ones that are closed, intolerant, and sclerotic. As importantly, that preference is acutely aware of the multiplicity of community forms, scales, and levels that are in constant interaction, so a ‘perfect’ world is unlikely to ever arise from all perspectives. But a better one 144

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can and should be envisaged and worked towards. Importantly, that requires granting the practices of resistance an equal position in the institutional order of international society so as to enable a proper recognition of the place of unconventional social practices in response to common political challenges, dynamics, and dilemmas.

Conclusion The account of institutions developed by the English school is one of its most distinctive and important contributions to theorizing international relations. Yet the concept of ‘institution’ has remained a problematic one, despite the efforts to develop clearer taxonomic principles and to refine the list of historic, existing, and emergent institutions of international society and how they relate to one another. I have argued that this problem is twofold, at least in regard to the normative assessment of institutions. The potential to contribute to normative assessment has been taken throughout as being a key aspect of English school theory, one that marks it out from most other major theories of international relations, especially those with pretensions to being structural theories. The first of these two key problems is the inherent conservatism of dominant accounts of institutions; either because of the weakly justified privileging of interstate order as the normative lodestar of international society, or because of the conscious setting aside of normative judgement. In particular, this produces at best a systematic neglect, at worst a conscious exclusion, of those who are not sitting at the top table of world politics. The subaltern perspective on institutions is, I have contested, a viewpoint certainly worthy of at least equal consideration in normative assessment of the practices of international institutions. The second key problem is the lack of connection between accounts of institutions and the underpinning methodological approach to politics as a form of human activity rooted in community. This is perhaps unsurprising given that this disconnection is a central criticism of traditional pluralism made throughout this book. However, my discussion of institutions has gone further than just highlighting that shortcoming; I have also elaborated how and why pluralism can, if appropriately reformulated, offer an insightful normative critique of patterns and practices of world politics in a way that seeks to reconnect international society to world society in a way that is normatively progressive. The role of institutions in perpetuating injustice through the silencing of critical perspectives and voices in the name of ‘order’ is seriously neglected within a great deal of English school theory because of the presumed disconnection between the institutions of an 145

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international society and those of a putative world society. This is despite the well-established English school claim that the world society is an ever present element of world politics and for some English school theorists, like Wight (1977, 33–4), a necessary precursor to the creation of an international society. Wight’s argument rests on an assumption about the role of common culture in the creation of international society and that, of course, is something that pluralists are required to be sceptical about, given their distrust of claims about the existence of a common culture sufficiently robust to generate normatively powerful institutions. Wight, too, was sceptical about the strength of common culture in a post-World War 2 world characterized by the two great dynamics of the Cold War and decolonization, informing a somewhat pessimistic take on the future resilience of international society. I, too, have been sceptical about the extent to which a pluralism predicated upon the power of those two dynamics can endure in a world in which the Cold War is an increasingly distant memory and the battles (both figurative and actual) that characterized the dismantling of European colonialism are increasingly fought (figuratively) only by an ageing rearguard of national liberation struggle leaders. But that does not mean that such a monolithic and stagnant account of pluralism and pluralist institutions must stand. Pluralism can produce critical insight into the dynamics that are shaping emerging institutions and contribute to the study of institutions that suffer neglect because they are not part of the dominant discourse. Reconnecting the institutions of international society to a pluralist world politics reiterates that such institutions do not emerge from nowhere and are not just the creatures of a numerically tiny political elite, dominating the high offices of the world’s principal states. The English school’s account of institutions requires that they are political practices and are therefore connected to a practice-based account of politics that needs to appreciate, recognize, and explore the interconnections that exist between different practices and the communities that are bound up in those practices. This is why a revived pluralist account of institutions has the potential to generate analytical and normative purchase upon institutions both as a political concept and also upon those institutions that currently constitute international society. It is not, though, to follow Wilson’s (2012) appeal for a grounded theory of institutions rooted only in an empirical enquiry effectively limited to the practices of establishment elites. Stipulative definitions of institutions, including the institution of resistance, have an important role to play in avoiding a consideration of practice that is restricted by implicit epistemological claims about what are important practices that warrant subsequent investigation. This is an old problem for the English school. Looking back upon Bull’s list of five institutions of international society, it is striking how his portrayal detaches them from the politics that is experienced by most of the world’s 146

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population. Even the portrayal of a practice such as war, one that had touched the lives of a vast number of people during Bull’s lifetime, indeed ending the lives of more than 50 million of them, is a bloodless account of a very bloody practice that neglects much that is most politically and normatively significant about war in international relations, especially for those who have become its most frequent victims: civilians and women. Bull’s wider thoughts about the normative significance of war are similarly characterized by a fatalist rejection of the possibility of bucking a technological trend towards ever greater levels of destruction, against which ethical and political objections must fall, reinforced by a moral scepticism that doubts the traction any ethical prescriptions or proscriptions can gain in any case (Williams 2011). Yet this is not the way that debates about the ethics and practices of war have gone in the last twenty years. There has been a veritable renaissance in thinking about just war, for example, and notable public concern over a host of military issues such as the accidental targeting of civilians by the armed forces of the advanced industrialized world (the ‘collateral damage’ problem); the targeting of civilians by insurgent, secessionist, and terrorist organizations; the claims to authority to authorize war; preventive war; ‘drones’ and the potential emergence of autonomous weapons systems; and a host of other issues. This has undoubtedly shaped elite political action in a number of states, where concerns about the public fallout over ethically indefensible actions, such as torture or complicity in massacres, have threatened the stability of governments and even brought them down. Efforts by publics to distance themselves from their government’s involvement in wars, such as the use of the slogan ‘Not in My Name’ in the UK, initially in protest at UK involvement in the 2003 invasion of Iraq and subsequently in wider condemnation of support by the UK government for the ‘war on terror’, is indicative of the way in which the politics of war have both been popular and critical in a way that Bull, for one, appeared unable to countenance (Williams 2013). The emergence, disappearance, transformation, and stability of institutions in international society is not, therefore, a matter solely for the interstate elite operating in a cocooned environment separated from the politics of communities and their multifarious and complex engagements, disengagements, and interactions. The differing understandings and experiences of the practices sanctioned by institutions are therefore important, turning our attention not just to the winners in the current institutional constellation but also to the losers: those communities that are systematically disadvantaged by the way institutions are framed and operate. But it is also through critique and subversion of institutions, through the usurpation of their logics and the inversions of their conservative normative perspectives that new, normatively significant, and substantial critiques appear. These are multifarious in character and 147

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contradictory in intent. The idea of normative immanence is one that is also familiar to English school theorists, but that this can be regressive, certainly in cosmopolitan liberal terms, is something that is less widely acknowledged. Yet, as Buzan’s account of global anti-social dynamics such as organized criminality suggests, there is every reason to expect communities to emerge that do not buy into liberal discourses and agendas. Indeed, the restrictive, conservative discourse of sovereignty that has been led, understandably, by leading post-colonial states is being perpetuated by the heirs to political movements that used the liberal critique of sovereignty to such effect in challenging the claims of colonialism. That is not necessarily simply selfserving, as the debate over Confucianism and a Chinese international society has highlighted. Different ways of viewing the institutions of international society rooted in different cultural traditions and appealing to different communities are not way stations to an internalization of dominant practice. Those alternatives are not necessarily normatively superior—they may be sclerotic and intolerant—and they are certainly subject to normative critique and engagement by those who view them as regressive, especially those who are least advantaged by the social arrangements they represent. This, then, points towards the subject of the next chapter: the emergent patterns of practice and associated institutions outside of the standard, statist account of international society. This will see an engagement with world society as being the bedrock of pluralism, as discussed in Chapter 2, looking at how a community-based account of politics, and especially political action, provides a normatively rich perspective on those developments that the English school traditionally kicked into the long grass of ‘world society’ and which Buzan’s reformulation attempts to find a secure place for in the English school world view, but without engaging with the normative dimension.

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5 World Politics and the Pluralism of the Future, Rather than the Past

Introduction The argument to this point has been unashamedly normative in its focus: that the traditional pluralist position in the English school has been shown to be fundamentally flawed because of its neglect of what ought to be its bedrock claim about the normative desirability of ethically diverse communities. I have worked through a methodology to re-establish this claim and also what the implications of that are for the presently dominant statist account of international society and how that can be challenged by restoring a sharper critical edge to pluralism through a reconsideration of institutions. The pluralist cause is not lost, therefore, and there is an opportunity to establish a pluralist world society as a viable normative alternative to the more common solidarist or cosmopolitan account that tends to dominate English school debates. Certainly, I have argued, international theory ought to give the notion serious consideration and that this can give rise to a progressive and vibrant normative agenda that is strikingly at odds with the traditional pluralist agenda that is accurately, and damningly, identified by critics such as Hurrell (2007). One of the English school’s strengths, of course, is that it does not rely solely on the sheer force of the better normative theoretical argument to make its case. The concern with practice; the sense of theory being embedded in an appreciation for the historical, sociological, and legal developments of international societies; and the methodological pluralism of the school’s roots all mean that there is a need for ‘proper’ English school theory to be alive to the dynamics of the world in which we live, something I have shown in relation to the account of institutions in the previous chapter. Moving on from there, the goal of this chapter is to turn to a somewhat more detailed consideration of aspects of the landscape of contemporary world politics as seen from a

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revived pluralist perspective. Theoretical issues remain important, but the goal is to put a little more detail in place and to use that as a means of identifying key research tasks for the future where a revived pluralist position has the most to offer. The starting point for this discussion is Matthew Weinert’s (2011) reformulation of the pluralist-solidarist debate within English school theory, which he sees as having the potential to help shape empirical enquiry. The first part of the chapter discusses the strengths and weaknesses of Weinert’s approach, before moving on in the second part to look at one of the examples he cites— human security. The third section considers the issue of targeted killing and ‘drone’ strikes as exemplary of changes in military practice associated with the institution of war, but which operate in spaces, at scales, and on the basis of notions of responsibility that are at odds with the standard pluralist discourse on war. The fourth and final part considers questions of distributive justice—a traditional English school blind spot and a notion often seen as central to contemporary normative international political theory (e.g. Ignatieff 2012).

Pluralism and Solidarism as Ideal Types and Empirical Enquiry Weinert’s approach is especially useful because of the way that he sees the problems of the standard accounts of pluralism and solidarism as reflecting the inability of the concepts as usually defined to serve their ostensible purpose of defining the character of international society. The challenge here is that this characterization is located at the macro level and usually cast in rather binary terms: international society must be one or the other, but not a bit of both. As Weinert notes (2011, 22) what tends to result are debates between pluralists and solidarists that are litanies of empirical examples supposedly standing as evidence of the predominantly pluralist or solidarist character of international society. As the definitions of pluralism and solidarism are also moot, the basis against which to judge the weight of evidence is unclear. Bull’s (1966, 52) classic statement of a solidarist international society being one in which collective law enforcement takes place has been augmented by moves to associate solidarism with a transition to world society and a shift in the basis of international relations from a statist focus to an individual one, with the individual usually understood in broadly liberal terms as a rights holder and as the irreducible political unit (e.g. Linklater 1998, 24; Mayall 2000, 14). A solidarist international society is a way station on the path to a solidarist, post-sovereign world society. At a period when the world’s principal rising power, China, remains committed to the centrality and durability of the sovereign state as the fundamental unit of politics (e.g. Lynch 2009), that teleological approach seems at odds with diplomatic 150

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practice. Andrew Hurrell (2013) also identifies how diplomatic practice led by states such as China remains explicable in more traditional pluralist terms. As I have shown, traditional pluralism resists the world society logic and sees the weakness of enforcement measures in international law as amongst the key evidence for the durability of pluralism as the defining characteristic of international society. Indeed, Bull’s attempt at defining pluralism (1966, 52) offers us only an absence—pluralism exists where states are ‘capable of agreeing only for certain minimum purposes which fall short of the enforcement of the law’. Those minimum purposes, developed in The Anarchical Society (1977, 4–5, 16–20), are the rules around violence, property, and contract that constitute the existence of an international society in the first place. It is therefore almost impossible to know how to think about the development of agreements for anything beyond those three, fundamental, purposes within the pluralist-solidarist perspective until such time as they result in collective law enforcement and/or make an appeal to a cosmopolitan world society of individuals as their term of reference or as providing their normative justification, thus transcending the international society of states. That leaves a huge gap, in which most international political practice falls. Throwing this mess in the metaphorical dustbin is an obvious temptation, and certainly Buzan’s (2004) reformulation of English school theory recasts pluralism and solidarism in very significant ways in order to avoid that outcome. He views the positions as ends of a spectrum that characterize international society, with pluralist international societies having the most minimal agreements on the most basic rules and solidarist ones having entrenched, rich, and wide-ranging rules about a substantial number of issues that still, nevertheless, fall short of subsuming sovereignty fully into a supranational authority structure. This range, from ‘asocial’ to ‘confederative’ (Buzan 2004, 159–60), covers the range of international societies that have existed or have the potential to exist. Pluralism and solidarism lose any inherent normative connotations and instead become empirical ideal types. The potential for international society as it actually exists at any point to be ‘a bit of both’ is restored. Buzan also argues for recognizing the importance of regional variations in the location along this spectrum. Pluralism and solidarism are thus rendered normatively null, removing one of the key functions they traditionally served in the English school of providing competing accounts of the normatively central political units (states versus individuals) and delimiting distinctive normative claims about what sort of international society humanity ought to live in as well as what sort humanity actually does live in, with consequences for the sorts of political changes that ought to be welcomed and which ought to deplored. Weinert restores some of this normative content to the concepts, or at least he does so somewhat implicitly by accepting the significance of the normative 151

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connotations they bring in terms of establishing for many a presumption that the solidarist position is the progressive one (Weinert 2011, 29; also Williams 2005). He also seems to accept the competing normative agendas that typify the two positions as traditionally conceived: that solidarism is about the promotion of human rights over and against states; and pluralism is about the promotion of states’ rights even when that may require the neglect of human rights in order to better achieve order amongst states. This fits with the dominant, standard account of the two positions (e.g. Keating 2013). Additionally, solidarism possesses a far more clearly articulated vision of what an ideal world would look like—Weinert uses the human security agenda to instantiate this, whilst traditional pluralism is far less clear cut on this topic because it is, as Mayall (2000, 14) asserts, a principally procedural account of what ‘justice’ involves. The ultimate outcome of those procedures enabling orderly coexistence is unspecified and perhaps even unspecifiable. More interesting, from my perspective, is that Weinert (2011, 31–2) wishes to argue that an ostensibly solidarist notion of human security is not incompatible with some version of a pluralist account of international society. This is because of the way in which humans who are protected and empowered—two key concepts in the human security debate—are more likely to create strong, stable, rights-respecting states that will be valued by their citizens and more likely to meet their obligations towards other states. The individual as the immediate referent object of human security and the state as the ultimate referent object, to borrow Weinert’s (2011, 31) formulation, does appear to offer a squaring of the circle, at least to some extent, by ‘nesting’ one set of normative objectives within another. Such nesting creates tensions along a variety of axes, such as short term and long term, where the immediate good of preventing loss of life may come at a cost of long-term damage to the bases of international society. That, for example, is the basis for Robert Jackson’s (2000, 291) scepticism about humanitarian intervention. The key problem with this solution from the perspective of a revived pluralism, however, is that a good deal of this move rests on the potential for reconciliation between pluralism and solidarism that has impelled some to argue for the solidarism at the heart, or in the soul, of pluralists. Wheeler and Dunne’s (1996) analysis of Bull’s supposed ‘pluralism of the intellect and solidarism of the will’ stands as the clearest instance of this claim, but it is quite widespread. This creates the idea that pluralism is a normatively ‘secondbest’ account (Brown 1995). Pluralists, on this reading, accept the normative superiority of a cosmopolitan world society, but do not believe it is ever likely to be more than a pipe dream and that we must seek to make the best of what we do have, which is a statist international society. The root for this lies in Bull’s (1977, 21) oft-quoted, but in context somewhat jarring, line that the ‘ultimate units of the great society of all mankind [sic]’ are individuals, who 152

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‘are permanent and indestructible in a sense in which groupings of them . . . are not’. In context, the ‘groupings’ Bull is referring to are states or, to use his generic term, ‘independent political communities’. That seems, on the basis of historical surveys, such as Buzan and Little’s (2000), to be perfectly true. Human beings have created a wide variety of institutional arrangements that may be independent political communities but that do not resemble modern states sufficiently for the analogy to hold. Bull, indeed, offered an account of a future for international relations that picked up on one such historical instance via the idea of ‘neo-medievalism’ that is perhaps the most interesting of the alternative institutional futures he canvasses in the final third of The Anarchical Society. Weinert’s reassessment of the pluralism-solidarism debate appears to accept this framing, seeing traditional pluralism’s commitment to a statist perspective and a normative privileging of statist international society as pragmatic rather than deeply principled: it is second best. One of the claims of a revived pluralism, of course, is that groupings of human beings are ‘permanent and indestructible’, at least normatively speaking, although ‘groupings’ here does not refer to ‘independent political communities’. One of the points I took from Arendt in Chapter 2 is that the atomized individual is ‘lonely’, and that it is through membership of communities that human beings come to know themselves and to experience their agency, in part through locating their unique, distinctive self in the company of others. Community membership is a permanent and indestructible feature of being human in the general sense and those individuals deprived of such membership are stripped of a crucial element of their humanity. This is an important counter to Bull’s uncharacteristic support for the liberal sovereign subject as the irreducible political unit. That claim is a stronger one than Weinert allows pluralism, because of his acceptance of Bull’s ‘admission’ of the irreducibility of individuals, but is kept in check by the normative limitations placed on the extent of pluralism in Chapter 2. Pluralists may indeed, as Weinert suggests, go along with aspects of the human security agenda, but not just because human security can be good for states, as well as for individuals, and may enhance the level of order attainable within international society. Pluralists may concur with human security not because of a contingent commitment to the value of individual human beings understood as liberal sovereign individuals. They may do so— indeed, ought to do so—because of an absolute commitment to the value of human plurality and its manifestation in communities that create the opportunity for good human lives. Specific communities of which people are members wax and wane. Some have very broad, possibly universal, potential constituencies, although not actual ones, such as monotheistic religions. But the need for community membership to establish the substantive ethical significance and normative value of humans is necessarily universal. It is 153

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also increasingly plural because of the increasingly dense nexus of communities within which individuals find themselves. We are members of multiple communities and ‘to community’, to recall my unfortunate neologism, is an essential part of political life. Weinert’s (2011, 35–9) move to re-establish the analytical utility of pluralism and solidarism glosses over these normative concerns. His appeal to ‘go micro’ and use an ideal-typical approach made up of thick and thin pluralism and thick and thin solidarism arranged as a spectrum for assessing the relative strengths and weaknesses of the different types in relation to specific policy areas has considerable advantages. This enables actual empirical examples of security discourse and debate to be assessed in terms of how much pluralism and how much solidarism they reflect, and also the strength of the pluralism and solidarism involved. However, this approach risks reducing the real normative theoretical differences that exist between pluralism and solidarism as perspectives on the nature and purpose of normative theory. It retains, too, the implicit normative presumption in favour of solidarism. Weinert (2011, 39) notes as a key advantage of this scheme that: ‘A micro focus encourages consideration of how solidarist commitments have been and may be absorbed into a state-based international society and how pluralist or more instrumental commitments have been or may come to be relaxed in favour of more solidarist aspirations.’ There are echoes here of Benhabib’s (2000, 70) position, discussed in Chapter 2, that the outcome of ethical enquiry into, debate over, and participation in social practice is recognition and acceptance of the interdependence of the ‘us’ upon the ‘them’ and the injustice of the separation and subjugation inflicted on ‘them’ in the making of ‘us’. We will head in the direction of ‘solidarism’. The implications seem clear: pluralism is instrumental, and thus not fully normative; solidarism is aspirational, and thus normatively superior. Whereas Buzan excises completely the normative dimension of the pluralist-solidarist debate in pursuit of macro-analytical gains, Weinert reintroduces this dimension to enable more nuanced and finer-grained empirical analysis of issue areas, but in a way that retains the problematic presumptions that pluralism has little to offer in normative terms. That introduces bias into the analysis of the ‘micro’ empirical issues because movement away from thick pluralism and towards thick solidarism is normatively desirable and movement in the other direction is not. That seems at odds with Weinert’s reaching out to ‘moderate’ or ‘relaxed’ pluralists because, whilst his scheme opens a path to taking seriously the empirical phenomena pluralists tend to emphasize in analysis of the weakness of and limits to solidarist dimensions of international society, it does not grant sufficient weight to the normative vision that they possess because this is cast as procedural, instrumental, and lacking in aspiration.

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As this book has tried to establish, pluralism, appropriately revised, possesses a normative vision that is none of those things.

Security, ‘Human Security’, and Pluralism There are reasons for being uncertain about the extent to which Weinert’s reformulation of the pluralist-solidarist debate is effective in enabling a more meaningful and more engaged normative debate between pluralists and solidarists. Nevertheless, his effort to retain the normative dimension offers something that Buzan’s alternative recasting of the deeply inadequate standoff cannot. Retaining the connection between empirical and normative analysis is a clear commitment for the English school—it is one of the things that marks it out as a theory of international relations from the usual perspectives—and Weinert’s more empirical contribution is a valuable one. This is, as he suggests, not because of the novelty of insight or data that characterize Weinert’s account of human security, but more in the sense that it is illustrative of the enhanced possibilities that come from shifting the pluralist-solidarist debate away from a macro-level assessment of the predominant character of international society and towards one where gradations of pluralism and solidarism enable analysis of particular policy areas or empirical phenomena and locate them within a common analytical framework that enables normative assessment to play a role. Weinert’s chosen topic—the evolution of the understanding and acceptance of a concept of ‘human security’ amongst the world’s governments— demonstrates the benefits that such an approach can bring. It also enables discussion of the benefits of adopting a revived pluralist position and the potential critical edge that it brings to the English school via the addition of a master primary institution of resistance. Again, I make no claims to offer original, innovative primary data to add to this debate, but, as with Weinert, see this as a fruitful illustration of how a revived pluralism’s contribution can stimulate empirical analysis that acknowledges the inescapable normative dimension. The human security debate illustrates the way in which efforts to embed new conceptualizations of key issues such as security are dynamic, not necessarily predictable, and frequently have significant implications for the content of the concept, too. Additionally, Weinert brings out how the fate of a notion such as human security is entangled with a range of other political developments, with the invasions of Afghanistan in 2001 and, especially, Iraq in 2003, having a very significant impact on the trajectory of the human security debate. It also illustrates a range of possible bases for categorizing states’ responses to conceptual innovation: by region, by socio-economic status, 155

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and by regime type. Furthermore, it also potentially tells us something about states’ self-identification with, for example, the importance of multilateralism to Canada, the notion of Norway as a ‘peace nation’, and the particular historical experience of Japan contributing to the nature of their adoption of the human security concept. Equally, those states rejecting the concept entirely—such as Iran—and those sceptical of its usefulness—such as Russia and China—are instances of states whose policy on such issues typically stresses conventional pluralist accounts of sovereignty. They also identify themselves with culturally shaped positions that are sceptical towards ‘Western’ notions that emphasize the importance of the individual and which see sovereignty as being contingent on fulfilling certain basic standards in relation to individual human rights and the provision of certain minimal standards of protection and liberty. One of the most interesting points in relation to the diplomatic history of the reception of human security has been the near universal rejection of any link between human security and the use of force by states. Human security, humanitarian intervention, and the responsibility to protect have been decoupled in official interstate discourse. Weinert’s appeal to ‘go micro’ demonstrates the way in which conventional pluralist and solidarist arguments are in play in relation to human security, how different states’ governments use those arguments in the political debates surrounding the interpretation and adoption of the concept, and how this helps us to think about the balance between different trends in international society, including the weight of realist international system dynamics and globalizing world society dynamics. Similar insights can be gained from applying the same analytical schema to the related concept of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P in UN ‘text-message speak’). The decoupling of R2P and human security, with invocation and application of the former being seen as an example of the failure to attain the latter, is interesting given the obvious similarities and parallels between the two ideas as originally formulated. The parsing of the concepts through the diplomatic process and the impact of the Afghan and Iraq wars on R2P have been similar to the modification of human security. The modification of R2P has downplayed the more radical elements of the 2001 report by the Canadian-sponsored International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS) which proposed an extensive rethinking of sovereignty such that its possession would be contingent upon governments respecting basic minimum standards of human rights. The emphasis on the prevention of humanitarian crises via potentially intrusive preventive deployments and intensive diplomatic efforts, along with substantial reconstruction responsibilities after interventions, certainly appeared to call into question the standard account of sovereignty that had emerged in the post-World War 2 era under the influence of decolonization. The cool reception of the ICISS report 156

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by a great many of the world’s governments underpinned the eventual manner of its incorporation in the 2005 World Summit outcome document (UN 2005). That document points towards a reinterpretation that strips out the more radical, rights-based cosmopolitan elements of the proposal. Restricting the applicability of R2P to genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and ethnic cleansing corralled the notion within areas already well established within international humanitarian and human rights law. What neither of these accounts attempt to capture, or would be able to capture were they to try, are non-state-based perspectives on the human security and R2P agendas. The classic problem for the English school, especially for traditional pluralism, is an inability to effectively engage with nonestablishment perspectives, except through the mechanism of posing them as being deviant from the establishment perspective. This is not to trivialize or underestimate the importance of the establishment perspective and the activity of capturing it analytically, but it is to identify a potential blind spot that ought to be corrected if possible, alongside the in-built, if implicit, ethical privileging of the liberal cosmopolitanism of the human security agenda. This is what a revived pluralism seeks to do. It is also to move beyond the account offered by Ayoob’s (2002) subaltern realism, which similarly privileges a statist perspective, although, in Ayoob’s case, it is the perspective of weak states over strong ones. The human security agenda has sparked substantial analytical attention, sitting alongside and engaging with the diplomatic process that has seen the concept embedded, if in substantially modified form, into contemporary state discourse. Human security’s efforts to establish human individuals as the referent object of security discourse and practice, and to reduce the emphasis on the state as the presumed centrepiece of security, offers substantial potential benefits to a revived pluralism. Clearly, it shifts the perspective away from the state as the focus of international society and invites an analytical perspective that is more in tune with the focus on individuals embedded within multiple communities that is central to the revived pluralist project. The explicit stance of ‘critical security studies’ is also to emphasize the necessity, both analytical and normative, of analysing security practice and discourse from the perspective of those who gain least and to advocate for security practices that are most advantageous to the weakest (e.g. Booth 1995; Krause and Williams 1997). The notion of emancipation—the idea of freeing people from constraints that prevent them from leading the life they would freely choose to lead—has been put at the heart of the critical security studies agenda, led by Ken Booth (1991). This adds an explicitly normative dimension to the debate, not just in terms of highlighting the imperative for security to address the challenges that most affect the weak and dispossessed, but also in the way that Booth argues for the centrality of emancipatory praxis at the 157

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heart of the academic study of security issues. The notion of an impartial, detached account of human security is rejected in favour of one that sees normativity as being inextricably entangled with the activities of conceptualizing and analysing security. Critical security studies is sceptical about the ways in which the human security agenda has been taken up in state practice, especially by the US and other leading powers. The principal focus centres on a classic concern of postcolonial states about human security, too: the potential for abuse of the concept by the powerful to legitimize coercive, intrusive, and violent practices that are aimed primarily at enhancing the security of their own state and citizens. The securitization (e.g. Buzan and Wæver 2003; Buzan et al. 1998; Williams 2003) of issues such as poverty, disease, and environmental change all carry this risk because of the way that securitization frames issues as establishing existential threats that legitimize exceptional measures in order to minimize or eliminate risk. The questions of ‘risk to whom?’ and ‘risk of what?’ are indicative of the concerns and cast interesting light on changing security practices by leading states. The rise of accounts of risk in international relations that see it through a post-structural, typically Foucauldian, lens have emphasized risk as a technology and technique of governmentality that subjugates and controls (e.g. Aradau and van Munster 2007; de Goede 2008; Salter 2008). Securing populations against risks becomes a discursive mechanism for taking coercive, even violent, action against others on the basis of ostensible probabilities of outcomes framed in terms of potential located at some point in the future. The more catastrophically the outcome can be framed, and the more excluded the ostensible source of the risk, the lower the level of purported probability necessary to legitimize aggressive action. The nexus of critically informed literature around risk, security, and securitization is very large and often diverse. Nevertheless, and in common with other critical perspectives on related topics, such as geopolitics (e.g. Ó Tuathail 1996; Power and Campbell 2010), the critique developed of the adoption and implementation of human security reflects common concerns of power imbalances, co-option, abuse, and exploitation in order to serve the interests of dominant states. Human security’s concern with issues such as poverty, disease, and bad governance are open to co-option by dominant states that deploy resources to address these challenges in ways that are principally designed to protect themselves from the feared security implications of these situations. This state-centric, policy-oriented account of human security risks undermining what are usually seen as core cosmopolitan normative commitments inherent in the human security concept (Bellamy and McDonald 2002; Thomas and Tow 2002). Thus, efforts to recalibrate security assistance missions in less developed countries to better reflect a human security agenda become about countering economic migration flows, quarantining diseases, 158

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and strengthening the security apparatus of weak states in order to better combat transnational terrorists perceived to target the permissive environment created by weak governance. The securitization of these issues is led by the dominant states and operationalized in such a way as to ensure that it is the security concerns of those states that are addressed most effectively. A security discourse legitimizes this perspective, as the securitization literature attests, and serves to divert attention away from alternative explanations of security threats arising from human security shortcomings. Fundamental, structural imbalances in the global patterns of production, trade, investment, and income distribution, for instance, can be set to one side in the face of the securitized imperative to take urgent and exceptional action to address existential threats. The militarization of the discourse reinforces this trend. Critical analyses of the efforts over the last decade to establish new modes of thought that integrate defence, development, and diplomacy (3D) have tended to emphasize the way in which military concerns win out over developmental and diplomatic ones. The creation of AFRICOM (Africa Command) by the US stands for some as an example of this, with the huge resource imbalances between the Pentagon, State Department, and USAID inevitably proving telling in the way in which AFRICOM’s operations have been shaped to put US security concerns about the region front and centre, rather than concentrating more on longer-term issues aimed at addressing deep-rooted local issues that help to explain human insecurity in the region. The distribution of AFRICOM personnel, resources, and activities points to the privileging of securing trade routes, raw material access, and counterterrorism priorities for the US, with the Pentagon firmly in the driving seat (Bachmann 2010). These critical perspectives are undoubtedly useful in helping thinking about ways in which the human security agenda can be co-opted. The subaltern perspective canvassed earlier points to how a revived English school pluralism can seek to engage effectively with these critical analyses of human security notions as developed and implemented in practice. This, though, needs to be in a way that is in accordance with the rather different intellectual and methodological backdrop that the English school draws upon. This means that seeking to create a critical or post-structural English school account of human security is a non-starter. What can be taken from this brief survey of the development of some leading critical analyses of human security’s implications and operationalization is the contrast that exists between such accounts and Weinert’s far more positive assessment of the admission of human security into international society. What is important to my argument is the way that the critical accounts, particularly those indebted to post-structural analytical traditions rooted in Foucault, struggle to develop a normative account that is sufficiently open to 159

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plurality. This reflects the focus upon the discursive construction of language that reflects dominant social structures, resulting in the inescapability of power relations. The normative ambition of a concept like human security is inevitably co-opted, becoming part of the power structures it ostensibly seeks to transcend in the name of universality. The ability to get a grip on the normative is stymied by the entanglement of normative concepts in the discursive legitimation of power structures. Even the normative visions of the weak and dispossessed are limited and channelled by the need to be comprehensible within terms of discourse set by the strong. The normative assessment of human security within the English school therefore needs to tread a line between the sort of strategies represented by Weinert’s conventional analysis and the critical and post-structural approaches. Pluralism offers a means to do this effectively because it offers a distinctive account of the ‘human’ element of human security, placing this element of the concept at the forefront of thinking in a way that other analyses tend not to because there tends to be an assumption that the ‘human’ must be the liberal sovereign subject. For solidarists like Weinert that is normatively good. For critical theorists like Booth it is more problematic, but given that enabling individuals to lead the lives they would freely choose to lead provides the normative content of the emancipatory intent that drives the normative dimension of his project, it is not an obviously incompatible notion. A revived pluralism offers a different and distinctive account of being human, though, via the Arendtian emphasis on the plurality of humanity and the necessity of living within a community and acting politically to realize one’s human status. Augmenting this with recognition of a world politics that sees individuals’ membership of multiple communities adds further depth to the analysis because of its ability to appreciate the impact of globalization on the institutional, political, social, cultural, and economic contexts of community membership. That shifts a critical, normative engagement with human security back towards the idea of the normative virtue of the verb form of community. A revived pluralism is interested in analysing the extent to which individuals are secure via their ability to act politically, in Arendt’s sense, through their participation in meaningful communal lives. That plural—‘lives’—at the end of the previous sentence is important, of course, because this is not just about living within a secure independent political community; it is about the recognition that human beings are members of multiple communities, and necessarily so. Human security is therefore something that needs to be thought about on multiple axes if analysis is to capture the constellation of dynamics involved. It is a concept that, from this perspective, should capture the instability of security; that it is something that human beings experience at multiple levels in multiple ways at any one time. The security of the human 160

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is not something that can be consolidated into a single judgement at a single moment, or even established as a single end point, or which can be used as the basis of definitive assessment. The security of human individuals is instead understood from this perspective as being a relative and transitory phenomenon linked to the ability to access opportunities for action such that people can bring about change in their life chances and conditions in some aspect of their multidimensional lives. That reflects both the Arendtian origins of the account of action and the centrality of plurality, and of the normative condemnation of sclerosis and exclusion, but filters these through a perspective on world politics that is attuned to the institutional environment of contemporary international society and emergent arenas of world society. Pluralism and solidarism are thus reformed in a way that, in one sense, aligns with Weinert’s schema in that they are not presented as necessarily incompatible characterizations of the overall nature of world politics, to be decided on the basis of empirical assessment. It also follows through on his appeal to ‘go micro’ and use them as ideal types, at least up to a point, to assess the balance of dynamics in relation to a specific issue area. However, this account does not normatively load the dice in favour of a liberal, rightsbased account of solidarism and neither does it see the assessment of the relative location of an issue area along the four-stage spectrum as being a single judgement focused upon the current balance of institutional forces. Instead, this offers a multidimensional judgement about the current balance of dynamics set against a backdrop that sees the avoidance of sclerosis and exclusion as the appropriate reference. That has the potential to restore the humanity of human security in world politics because it offers a means to resist the tendencies highlighted by critical accounts that stress the colonization of a supposedly humanistic account of security by the interests and perspectives of powerful institutions. It does this in a way, though, that avoids the normative problems of seeing all discourse as a manifestation of power, cooption, and coercion such that the progressive radicalism of today is the repressive hegemonialism of tomorrow. Resistance to these processes is not deviance, either, as the English school presents it at present. It is a compelling part of the historical development of international society and, increasingly visibly, of world politics. Its normative value is tested through its ability to avoid sclerosis and exclusion, to create places and spaces where human beings can insert themselves into the political life of their, many, communities. That is not going to be a uniform or consistent process, but it is one that is a human experience. A revived pluralism thus enables us to take a distinctive position on the emergence of the discourse of human security and its reception amongst the world’s governments. But, as importantly, it also opens the door to consideration of the reception given by non-governmental organizations and political 161

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communities that operate at sub-state and supra-state levels, too. That is an important advantage of a revived pluralist position that can not only offer a basis for effective engagement with sceptical responses to the concept, but can also engage with rejection of human security in a way that does not presume rejection to be deviance. Finally, we have also seen how pluralism can retain a normative perspective on human security that is more flexible than even revised versions of a pluralist-solidarist debate, but not one that dissolves into radical relativism. The third section of the chapter aims to assess the extent to which a revived pluralism can address a specific issue within world politics—the use of drones for targeted killings1—as a way of complementing the broad-spectrum issue of human security considered so far. It also enables me to assess the extent to which a practice long seen as central to international society—war—which is undergoing substantial transformation along multiple axes can be assessed by a revived pluralism in a way that does not necessarily presume an outcome in defence of the established status quo.

Targeted Killing: Pluralism, Drones, and the Spaces of World Politics The issue of ‘targeted killing’, ‘extrajudicial execution’, ‘assassination’, or whichever form of words we choose (although which form we choose does matter, particularly in law), is a very ancient one in political life. Killing political opponents, military commanders, cultural leaders, technological innovators, and commercial lynchpins in order to further military campaigns and increase chances of success in political struggles is an ancient tactic, and one that has been a continuous subject of discussion as to ethical validity and military utility (e.g. Gross 2006; Wachtel 2005). The current focus of concern is typically the use of the tactic by the United States government against those believed to be guilty of the commission, or to be preparing to commit, acts which may contribute to the prosecution of attacks against the United States, its citizens, or interests. The usage of the tactic accelerated during President Obama’s first term in office, although it was initiated by his predecessor, and

1 The term ‘drone’ is widespread to the point of ubiquity, but it is one that is disliked by the militaries that deploy them. Alternative terms include Unmanned (or sometimes Uninhabited) Aerial Vehicle, Remotely Piloted Aerial Vehicle (or System, to incorporate the entirety of the technological assemblage, beyond the actual airframe), and a number of others. There is value in these alternative terms, such as in the way that ‘remotely piloted’ helps to remind us that crucial mission decisions, especially target engagement, are made by humans and not by the drone, although its sensory arrays clearly mediate that decision in important ways. However, the value such terms bring is not significant to my argument here, so I shall use ‘drones’ for simplicity’s sake.

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whilst strike numbers have declined since 2011, the tactic remains intensely controversial for a variety of reasons.2 Debate over drone strikes as a form of targeted killing is extensive and diverse. Controversy has surrounded the technology frequently used to carry out such strikes. Whether drones are ethically significant in and of themselves, or simply mark the latest in a long line of technological innovations that have enabled people to attack one another at a distance, is important. Critical analyses of these operations highlight a number of central elements of this debate: the effectiveness of targeted killing in achieving the ostensible policy goal of enhancing US security; the legality of the use of drones over the territory of states such as Pakistan; the legality, both internationally and in relation to US domestic law, of drawing up and acting upon ‘kill lists’ of suspects; the effectiveness of intelligence gathering that underpins targeted killing; the status of targets as ‘combatants’; the nature of the responsibility for the deaths of those unintentionally caught up in drone strikes (the ‘collateral damage’ issue); and the impact of extended and detailed surveillance of communities by drones prior and subsequent to the use of lethal force against one or more community members (e.g. International Human Rights and Conflict Resolution Clinic (Stanford Law School) and Global Justice Clinic (New York University School of Law) 2012 (hereafter IHRCS and GJC 2012)). However, what animates my analysis is the focus upon community and the pluralist account of political life. The impact of drones on communities subjected to their surveillance and violence is the starting point for a pluralist analysis because of the way in which pluralism puts community at the forefront of its analysis. There is a trajectory in analysis critical of the use of drones to concentrate on the communities subject to drones. This highlights the impact on quotidian life of the near constant overflight by drones: uncertainty as to who may be the target of their surveillance, when or if lethal force may be used against community members, impacts on restrictions on movement and assembly (including school attendance), and the corrosive uncertainty about the quality of the intelligence that may be passed to drone operators for whatever reason (IHRCS and GJC 2012). Added to this, the technological aspects of drone surveillance, using software systems that are designed to

2 The debate over the number of drone strikes and the casualties they have inflicted is complicated by the lack of fully reliable data. Three non-governmental sources are usually cited in this regard: the Long War Journal (see , (both accessed 21 October 2013)); the Bureau of Investigative Journalism (see http://www.thebureauinvestigates. com/category/projects/drones/ (accessed 21 October 2013)); and the New America Foundation (see http://counterterrorism.newamerica.net/ (accessed 21 October 2013)). In September 2013, the UN Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of human rights and fundamental freedoms whilst countering terrorism issued a report specifically calling on the US government to release its own data on drone strike casualty figures (Emmerson 2013, 24).

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log, map, and correlate social activity to identify ‘targets’—so-called ‘signature strikes’—and the use of such data gathering in order to identify associates of ‘targets’ and thus potential further targets, enhance the ability of drones to erode and undermine social cohesion. In conservative Muslim societies, where preserving culturally understood notions of female modesty are deep rooted, surveillance of this sort has a particular impact and, of course, serves to establish the gendered nature of drones’ impacts on societies (e.g. Gregory 2011a; Williams 2011). This chimes with the notion of the subaltern perspective established as a key theoretical and normative strength of a revived pluralism in Chapter 4. It also serves to point towards perhaps the key insight into this issue a revived pluralism offers: concerns over the dehumanizing effect of drone strikes. ‘Signature strikes’, where unnamed and unknown individuals are killed because their pattern of behaviour coincides with that associated with ‘militants’, stands as one example of this issue, with concerns over the radically isolating effects of drone operation on pilots being another. However, the novelty of either of these phenomena is doubtful: impersonal killing of unknown individuals and the isolating effects of technology and distance have been features of warfare for decades, if not centuries. Drones arguably take them to a new level, but they do not alter the basic elements of the relationship in a novel fashion. Indeed, decades-old technology of nucleararmed intercontinental ballistic missiles would appear to still stand as the apogee of human ingenuity in terms of impersonal, long-distance killing. The pluralist perspective on targeted killing does, though, pick up on a feature of drone technology that, although not new in itself, is distinctive in comparison with other forms of long-distance impersonal killing. The claims to precision made in relation to drones are not just the accuracy of the ordnance. It makes little, if any, difference whether the missile is delivered by piloted fast jets or drones (or some mix of the two—now that the US has created remotely piloted F-16 jets, initially for ‘target practice’ in training fast jet pilots (Kelion 2013)) in this regard, augmented by the supplementary technology for assessing patterns of collateral damage and authorizing strikes (Crawford 2013). The ‘long loiter’ or ‘persistent presence’ claims for drones (Williams 2011) are interesting because of the way they create the potential for ‘distant intimacy’, whereby operators based thousands of miles from their targets can observe the life patterns of those in whom they are interested, potentially for very extended periods of time. This can build up a picture of an individual’s life, and the lives of their family, friends, and contacts, which both feeds into intelligence gathering but also feeds into decisions about when to kill. All of this is done in real time and with high-definition video. Augmented with signals intelligence to monitor and relay communications and a variety of 164

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other intelligence streams, the appeal of the drone as a means for targeted killing is easy to understand, from the perspective of the drone deployer. Being able to pick the moment of strike so that the target is alone, or in the company of other targets, or is in a situation where non-combatant casualties are deemed acceptable by the drone operator and his or her commanders is novel. The opportunity for operators to share decision making about the use of force with colleagues, legal advisors, and political authority is also far greater from the control booth of a drone than it is from the cockpit of a fast jet. That ought to improve the quality of decision making and serve to militate against the dangers of individuals misinterpreting evidence or failing to fully understand their obligations and responsibilities. Previously, such intimacy in the lives of specific human targets would only be available by being in relatively close proximity to the target—perhaps no more distant than the range of a sniper’s rifle. It would also typically involve being in a position of significant personal physical danger, something that is absent from the world of drone operators, although there are concerns about the psychological harms they face. This distant intimacy is exclusively one way. Subjects of surveillance may have no knowledge at all of what is happening and certainly those currently most typically subject to such surveillance have no means of reciprocating. This extreme imbalance is of interest to a revived pluralism because of the way that it renders the relationship between drone operative and surveillance subject if not asocial then something close to it. The drone operator may know a great deal about the person in their sight(s), but that person may be unaware of the existence of the operator or the technology that enables the knowledge about them to be transmitted. It is easy to see why notions of the ‘Panopticon’ have been invoked in critical analysis of drone surveillance and the notion of a ‘scopic regime’ (e.g. Gregory 2011b). The pluralist ethics of drones, though, takes this insight in a direction that emphasizes two distinct strands of this distant intimacy. The first is the way in which it creates the effect of ‘loneliness’ for those subject to such surveillance in a manner akin to totalitarianism, but here the political authority from which the subject of surveillance is alienated is not that which governs the territory where they live or whose citizenship they possess, but is the political authority of a distant, foreign state exercising life and death power in a highly specific and limited manner. The second is the way in which the subaltern perspective can provide a basis for a distinctive critique of the institution of warfare as it is developing through technologies of distant intimacy. This draws upon the cultural, religious, and social perspectives of the target’s communities, seeking to engage the reference points and critical perspectives that frame their discourse and perspective. Both of these points highlight how it is that targeted killing, especially by drones, is about far more than what might be expected to 165

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be the traditional pluralist emphasis: the compromising of a state’s sovereignty. Instead, the discourse of counterterrorism and the deployment of novel technologies extend into reconstructing the subjectivity of individual targets in ways that nullify their citizenship. The ethical significance of loneliness for pluralism has already been established in Chapter 2, drawing on Arendt’s (1973a) classic analysis of totalitarianism. For Arendt, of course, totalitarianism meant Stalin’s Soviet Union and, in particular, Nazi Germany. It was the sovereign state within which the individual lived that had the potential to create the conditions of loneliness: it existed within a geographical space that was defined by conventional territorial limits. Loneliness—the impossibility of trusting social relations with equals through which the individual could insert themselves into a meaningful life enabling action—can now be brought about in a way that transcends that traditional sovereign territoriality. It can also be brought about in a way that creates loneliness within the one-directional social relationship of distant intimacy, although this can be augmented by the corrosive effects of drone surveillance on other social relations that arise from fears of informers (IHRCS and GJC 2012, 99–102). This second dimension will not detain me long here, because it is a familiar element of the ethical critique of totalitarian states—the creation of an array of citizen informers that make any effort to engage in meaningful social interaction in a way that potentially challenges the accepted political dogma a dangerous enterprise. Pluralism’s ethical critique of drones instead focuses on the way in which the droneoperating society creates selective loneliness, choosing who, when, and for how long to create such conditions, on the basis of knowledge and conditions that are arbitrary to those subject to loneliness because they have no meaningful say in them. Whilst US political authorities may defend drone use on the basis of the quality of intelligence gathered, the rigour of the target-selection process, the precision of the targeting, the quality of the democratic oversight, and the legal permissibility of the policy, all of these systems are closed to those who are targeted. The political virtues of the United States—its democracy, its checks and balances, its commitment to the rule of law, the quality and dedication of the people working in these areas—can only count for nothing to those who are necessarily excluded from participation. The political community and authority that decides life and death is, to those targeted, arbitrary, alien, and totalitarian. The possibility of meaningful engagement is not only closed off by barriers of distance, citizenship, technology, and power, it is closed off by necessity—it is an inherent part of the ‘relationship’ that it is one way. The reasons given by Buchanan (2009) for rejecting the paternalism of medical relationships of old—that the doctors know what is best for the patient and can withhold information from them that the doctor feels may 166

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be distressing—are magnified here. Those subject to drone surveillance do not need to know or have any viable, meaningful ways of engaging with those responsible for the system, because the political, legal, and professional conduct mechanisms governing the system are sufficient to ensure that the subjects will be taken care of—a phrase that, of course, is deliberately double-edged in its use here. The pluralist perspective on targeted killing seeks a way of enabling subaltern reflection on the changing technology and doctrine of contemporary conflict, exemplified by the use of targeted killing. Fieldwork-based accounts of the impact of drones on society in the tribal areas of Pakistan, for example (IHRCS and GJC 2012), emphasize the disruption to the social practices and fabric of those groups subject to sustained drone surveillance and attack over a prolonged period. The policy recommendations that come out of this analysis are aimed principally at the US authorities, though. There is, therefore, a tendency to see previously existing indigenous practices as in some sense pristine or authentic and that restoring that condition by removing the drones is the responsibility of those who imposed the drones in the first place. Pakistani society in the tribal areas will be changed by the effect of drones, as it has been changed by the influx of populations and organizations displaced from Afghanistan by the war there. Resistance to drones is a subaltern activity. How social practices alter in ways that are responsive to drones ought to be the focus of a pluralist analysis of the phenomenon. In some cases this is prominent in discussions, but typically in terms of how this affects the ‘West’ via the notion of drones as ‘recruiting sergeants’ for violent militant organizations and how they have created antipathy towards the West on a scale previously absent, as measured through opinion polling (IHRCS and GJC 2012, 138–9). Better understanding is needed of the multifarious reactions within Pakistan, across the diverse communities within which people participate, in order to more effectively assess the impact of drones and the way in which the ethics of warfare are being changed. Some of that reaction is, doubtless, increased hostility towards the United States in particular and the ‘West’ in general. This, too, will take violent forms and see support for violent organizations. The language of such resistance will take forms that are particularly alarming to many in the West, as well as to a great many Muslims—martyrdom, jihad, and so on. But the sanctified glory of lethal violence—with its deeply ethically problematic elements of exclusion and sclerosis—is not the only form resistance takes. The language of ‘glorious’ violence, ostensibly authorized by God, is hardly unusual in societies undergoing violent conflict and neither is it confined to ‘militant’ Islam: ‘The Glorious Dead’ is inscribed in the stone of many war memorials in the UK, including the Cenotaph on Whitehall, which forms the centrepiece of annual Remembrance Day commemorations every November. 167

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There needs to be better understanding of changing social practices amongst people aiming to rebuild trust that has been undermined by perceptions of group members acting as informers; by perceived betrayal by Pakistan’s government, often seen as colluding in drone strikes (or at least powerless to stop them); and by the corrosive impact on established forms of social governance arising from the fear of being targeted should groups of men gather. Recalling the definition of ‘resistance’ from Chapter 4 should help ensure proper appreciation of the ethical significance of altered social practice and the creation of alternative means of enabling community life to continue and create value and values in people’s lives. Resistance is a means of categorizing and analysing political activity by the weak that seeks to overturn, subvert, sidestep, and bypass the established institutions of world politics in pursuit of the empowerment of the weak and the creation of alternative political orders. The actions of civil society and advocacy groups in the US and elsewhere that seek to alter US drone policy in order to ameliorate the impact the attacks have on ordinary people’s lives in places like Pakistan and Yemen take place within the established ethical frameworks of just war theory, rule of law (both international and domestic), and democratic accountability. The responses of local communities may indeed draw on this universal language, as well as on other universal languages, especially that of Islam, but also on very specific and localized practices and belief systems in order to find ways of retaining distinctive aspects and values of traditional practice disrupted and dislocated by drones. This multifarious response is incoherent, at least in the terms of a universal rights discourse and the standards of analytic philosophy, but that multidimensional response to the impact of drones and the vision of the future for those people most directly affected by them is a normal feature of an ethical response rooted in communities which operate at a variety of levels and where individuals experience multiple memberships. It is genuinely surprising to me that critical analysis by leading Western human rights groups of drone strikes in places like Pakistan and Yemen make no effort to deploy the dominant ethical tradition and perspective of those regions—Islam—as a means of critique. The experience of Yemeni and Pakistani communities must, apparently, be parsed through the language and law of human rights before it can become intelligible, meaningful, or significant. The report Living under Drones (IHRCS and GJC 2012) is emblematic here, in that its powerful critique of drone strikes makes no reference to Islamic ontologies, categories, concepts, values, or aspirations. Surely, this is the language most frequently used by the targets and victims of such strikes to understand the ethical significance of the social practices and forms of community drones disrupt. Why is it silenced?

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The complexity of war as an institution of international society and the reciprocal complexity of the resistance it inspires in subaltern communities is one of the areas where a revived pluralism has most to offer. The universalized logics of conventional critique in defence of the victims of warfare are filtered through the particularities of specific practice in the response of communities seeking to protect or rebuild their ways of living together in the midst and aftermath of organized and systematic violence. That is not just an inevitability of human life, but a normatively desirable outcome. Ethical concepts, frameworks, and practices are enhanced through the challenge of iterative interactions between the different scales of the local, specific, and particular up to the universal under conditions of seeking to find better ways of responding to profound challenges, such as those posed by violence, and how it is that communities can and do continue to exist in the face of destructive force, even when changed, sometimes profoundly, by the experience. This pluralist account, interested in the subaltern response to violence, may perhaps seem best suited to thinking about the ethics of a phenomenon like targeted killing, given the highly localized effects of the practice. Even the most destructive drone strikes in Pakistan, such as that on a tribal jirga in Datta Khel in North Waziristan on 17 March 2011 which killed approximately forty people (IHRCS and GJC 2012, 57–62), are localized in direct effect and limited in the numbers involved in comparison with debates over global distributive justice, which affects billions. The English school has had relatively little to say on this issue in the past, with traditional pluralism particularly quiet. If a revived pluralism is to make a claim to being the future of English school ethics and a radical, progressive ethical voice within the tradition, then it is necessary to outline what that contribution might look like. This cannot be a fully worked-out exposition—that would be a book of its own—but I can suggest what sort of distinctive contribution a revived pluralism might seek to make.

Pluralism and Global Distributive Justice ‘We are one humanity, but seven billion humans. This is the essential challenge of global ethics: how to accommodate the tension between our universal and particular natures’ (Rodin 2012, 33). Rodin’s starting point for thinking about global ethics suggests a binary position: the ethics of the one humanity or the ethics of the human being. The thrust of this book is that such an argument dramatically underestimates the ethical perspectives in play and privileges two perspectives that ought to be far less prominent in ethical debates about international relations than is typically the case. Neither effectively addresses the actual contexts within which human beings have to reach 169

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ethically significant decisions and which shape their normative visions of the past, present, and future. Distributive justice debates in international relations are, though, typically conducted in just these terms: how is it that the moral equality of each human being ought to be reflected in the distribution of goods and services, and access to them, in a way that is most just and equitable? The ‘view from nowhere’, as this is sometimes labelled, is contrasted with a ‘view from somewhere’ that is usually seen as being the view from a position of state citizenship which demands the privileging of citizens of one state over those of another in just this distribution. Michael Ignatieff ’s (2012) reflections on this issue summarize and demonstrate these tensions concisely. He sees in this situation a necessary tension between justice—the global perspective— and democracy—the statist one—because democracy is necessarily limited to a particular group of people who are almost inevitably going to vote for distributive situations which privilege themselves over non-voters. He echoes Brad Roth’s observation that democracies ‘have the right to be wrong about justice’ (Ignatieff 2012, 13). ‘Democratic choice will be ordered by the preference of citizens, and free debate among citizens will determine the distribution of scarce domestic resources and international claims to them’ (Ignatieff 2012, 13). This privileging is restricted, argues Ignatieff, by two mechanisms. The first is the responsibility owed by states to other states, such that state conduct is limited by the familiar strictures of international society in terms of violence, property, and agreement. This has been augmented in recent years by restrictions on state practice towards its own citizenry under the doctrine of the Responsibility to Protect (Ignatieff 2012, 17–18). Second, the dynamics of globalization are also creating a whole host of new international and transnational connections that are both raising the profile of global justice in the democratic decision-making processes of states and pressing for greater acknowledgement and acceptance of the demands of distributive justice that recognize that citizenship is, at least to some extent, morally arbitrary. Climate change, poverty, trade injustice, human rights abuses, and other issues are all to the fore in pressing these global justice issues, and Ignatieff (2012, 12) singles out the role of global civil society in this regard. There are a number of other authors operating along similar lines to those Ignatieff summarizes, and to whom he acknowledges his intellectual debts. Thomas Pogge, Charles Beitz, Simon Caney, Peter Singer, and Henry Shue all come to mind readily for anyone familiar with this debate. At its core, whether in agreement or dispute, lies Rawls’ seminal Theory of Justice (1971) that has done so much to set the tone of the global ethics debate. The quote from Rodin that opened this section is drawn from his response to Ignatieff ’s article—itself a response to the Carnegie Council on Ethics and International 170

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Affairs’ initiation of a project to reimagine a global ethic in commemoration of its centenary in 2014. Both Ignatieff and Rodin seem to see this binary basis of ethics as inescapable and necessary, with Rodin (2012, 34) going so far as to assert that ‘we are “pulled” toward a global ethic by the universal core implicit in the very idea of ethics’. For Ignatieff (2012, 12), ‘the one-world perspective that emerges from the world of these philosophers [specifically Pogge, Shue, and Singer] has provided a common moral vocabulary that drives the activism of civil society NGOs everywhere’. The role of global ethics must, by necessity of the concept, be about individuals: ‘If a global ethic cannot empower discrete, identifiable individuals, in all their singularity, with specific claims they can enforce . . . what is it good for?’ (Ignatieff 2012, 9–10). The pluralist reaction to both Rodin’s claim about the inherent universal core in ethics and Ignatieff ’s about civil society NGOs is: ‘sometimes’. Sometimes there is a universal core in ethics, and sometimes civil society NGOs are driven by such universal ethical propositions: but not always, everywhere, and all the time. This contrasts with Ignatieff ’s reading of Roth, where justice must ultimately trump democracy and that globalizing social, political, and economic dynamics are moving inexorably in a direction that makes that more likely and this is normatively good. The conflicts that exist between humanity and humans and between justice and democracy will slowly, but surely, be resolved in directions that overcome the unjust imperatives of faith, nationalism, and other sorts of local, specific, and particular ethical frameworks. The logic of ethics itself, the force of philosophical reason, and the complex dynamics of globalization will ultimately bring this outcome about. We must work for it, encourage it, and argue for it, especially in the practical political world where the benefits of appealing to the local are apparent in terms of political success. The pluralist position is sceptical about this account of global moral and political progress whereby the two positions at the end of the ethical scalar spectrum—the universal and the individual—steadily overcome and subsume those that exist between them. There is here an echo of the classic English school notion of being a ‘middle way’ between realism and revolutionism, yet, unlike that middle way, here the pluralists find themselves between two polar positions that are seen as pushing in the same, rather than opposite, directions in terms of the normative vision of world order they offer. The stress throughout this reformulation has been on the centrality of community (noun and verb forms) to ethics and the role of an account of action indebted to Arendt as providing the manifestation of a political ethic. This necessitates membership of a properly functioning community whereby individuals can engage in trusting political relationships that enable them to insert themselves into the space in between created by community. The processes of globalization that are seen as contributing to the development of the ‘universal-individual’ 171

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ethic that bridges the ends of the spectrum at the expense of the middle assumes that the ‘particular’ interests of the sub-global are suspect. Some privileging—of our own children and family, for example—is ‘natural and defensible enough’ (Ignatieff 2012, 12) but, note, only ‘enough’—there are limits to how far we may go in privileging such people in the face of the universal-individual ethic’s overriding logic. Yet, if it is accepted that ethics are a social phenomenon and analysis acknowledges the empirical point made by the global ethics literature about the impact of globalization, then the responses and reactions to the changing global dynamics are as likely to be community based as they are to be in accord with the universal-individual ethic. Ignatieff ’s claim that ‘civil society NGOs everywhere’ are animated by a global ethic just looks to be empirically dubious. Some civil society NGOs are indeed animated in this way—major global human rights, development, and environmental NGOs like Human Rights Watch, Oxfam, and Greenpeace come to mind. Yet others exist to counter and challenge the global-individual logic: civil society NGOs that campaign against immigration, for example, or that emphasize the specific obligations that people may feel they have to assist co-religionists or co-nationals elsewhere, or that seek to restrict and control what are seen as ‘corrupting’ influences of globalizing culture in relation to ‘traditional’ local values—for example in the efforts to control access to commodities such as pornography or alcohol or, even, to the discourse of individual rights and equality. ‘Cultural harm’, for example, provides a powerful argument for seeking to restrict—potentially even to outlaw—access to certain types of material or specific types of behaviour. In the UK, the argument has been significant in debates about extreme pornography, for instance that depicting rape (e.g. McGlynn and Rackley 2007, 2009). That argument can be extended and gain traction in different ways in different social settings, ones where the notion of ‘cultural harm’ may be seen as inapplicable in the UK or another Western liberal democratic state, but may have meaning elsewhere. What is important is not whether the UK debate about the cultural harm of extreme pornography is justifiable in absolute terms—it is what a universal-individual ethic mandates—but that the concept of cultural harm is ethically relevant and is contested and debated. It is the ethical concept of ‘cultural harm’ that is transferable into different, multidimensional, settings, not the specific outcomes of one instance of that debate. That is true even when the argument is made as effectively as McGlynn and Rackley manage in relation to rape pornography. That debate involves different communities operating from the ultra local— parents discussing what is and is not appropriate for their children to be able to see on the internet at certain ages—through a range of social settings and engagements—other family members, friends, input from those who may be 172

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seen as possessing moral authority (such as community or church leaders, philosophers, and NGOs), the law (potentially at more than one level in situations where federal systems and regional or international law may be engaged), and global dynamics such as capitalism’s imperative to consume. What is ‘right’, ethically speaking, in relation to distributive justice questions is as likely to be as complex as working out ‘cultural harm’ debates. Indeed, the analogy stretches further in that distributive justice questions are also ‘cultural harm’ questions—what is the harm that is engendered by current distributions of resources and services? Some aspects of an answer to that question are self-evident: recall the data on the breathtaking inequality of wealth distribution identified in Chapter 3 and the impact of absolute poverty on health and life chances. Further, what are the most effective and appropriate ways of addressing that harm in order to bring about more just distributions of resources and services? There are not, pluralism wants to argue, definitive answers to those questions because the harms that are engendered by the present distribution of resources and services, whilst obviously massive, are not monodimensional. It is easy to be confident that more just distributive solutions than those that presently exist are possible, but this will always be a plural position—solutions as opposed to a singular, globally just solution— because of the way in which human political engagement through multiple community membership engenders incompatibility in the multiple scales and locations at which ethics exist. Present distributive outcomes are unjust not because they fail to accord with the logic of the universal-individual logic of justice, but because they bring about situations in which human beings are radically excluded: their ability to participate in a meaningful, communal life is denied because of their inability to access a share of the world’s resources and services necessary to do so. This is not, however, just a matter of biological necessity, it is a matter of political access, too. It may well be that a sclerotic culture that fails the ethical test of Chapter 2 provides its members with a biologically adequate standard of living, but without the ability to act politically, or in a situation in which levels of political action are deemed to be fixed and immutable, such that any kind of external engagement is treated with the gravest suspicion and assumed to be harmful. The status of girls and women in some of the most religiously strict and conservative communities might stand as an example: social role is deemed to be divinely ordained and control over resources, marriage partner, reproductive rights, bodily integrity, movement, and association may be in the hands of others—usually men—whether through being relatives or possessing status roles. Women and girls may not lack food, shelter, medical care, or some elements of education, but ‘harm’ remains an appropriate perspective to adopt.

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Those kinds of restrictions are increasingly difficult to sustain in the face of globalizing technological, social, and economic dynamics, but the role that those dynamics play in the resistance offered by those subject to sclerosis cannot be predetermined. Globalization may indeed be levering open the doors to some of the world’s most repressive and closed political and social systems, but it does not do so in a uniform fashion. Further, how those seeking to take advantage of the new ideas flowing through the gap around the door is also going to be shaped by how those ideas interact with the existing socially and culturally shaped ethical principles and practices. The flow will also be two way: the opportunity to interact with globalization includes seeking to inform those doing the levering about how the distributive consequences of opening should be thought about and engaged with at different scales. The invocation of the language of ‘harm’ in the context of a book about the English school necessitates some reflection on Andrew Linklater’s work in this area (Linklater 2007, 129–90, 2011). It is impossible to do full justice to his treatment of the subject at this point, and I will return to this topic in Chapter 6, but I do wish to highlight some areas where a revived pluralism departs from Linklater’s account, especially as developed in his initial setting out of his project. ‘Harm’ as used here lacks the conceptual subdivision that Linklater (2007, 138–41) proposes in the distinction drawn between ‘concrete’ and ‘abstract’ forms of harm. The former refers to ‘harm that particular human agents intentionally inflict on specific others who are placed outside the former’s moral community because of religious, racial or other supposedly morally decisive characteristics’ (Linklater 2007, 138). Abstract harm is not defined in quite such conscious terms, but is introduced (Linklater 2007, 141) in the context of a discussion of capitalism, and its globalization, pointing to it as being the non-intentional, unspecific negative consequences that afflict those who become embroiled in the structures of production, distribution, and trade that characterize this economic system. That certainly accords with the kind of distributive justice questions that are my focus here. The reasons for the ‘concrete’/‘abstract’ distinction are not explicitly set out on Linklater’s initial statement of the harm problem, yet it is clear that it is the former that is the focus of attention because of the way in which concrete harms offer the most immediate and most severe threats to the individual human being. This is apparent from the construction of the normative desirability of cosmopolitan harm conventions. Linklater (2007, 129) roots his account of harm in a social contractarian account of the origins of the problem of harm as we presently encounter it, appealing to a Kantian account that reproduces the universal-individual perspective already noted in debates about distributive justice and global civil society. The normative problem is the extent to which human beings can overcome the differences between them constructed by their citizenship of specific states and the doctrines of 174

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religious, national, and racial difference and superiority that seek to justify the commission of harm in the face of universal moral intuitions of equality (Linklater 2007, 129–32). The manifestation of such cosmopolitan harm conventions requires more than ‘mere sympathy for other human beings . . . ; it is necessary to create what has been called “speech communities” or “universal communication communities” in which the members of other communities can exercise the right to protest against harm’ (Linklater 2007, 134). The invocation of Habermas via the concept of universal communication communities invites the recall of Chapter 1’s doubts about the extent to which such an approach really offers a means of engaging fully with the bedrock normative claim about the irreducible plurality of human beings and the multiplicity of communities within which they live their lives. As with the critique of Benhabib (2002), who draws extensively on the same critical theoretical tradition as Linklater, the concerns over the selectivity and teleology of the processes of discourse ethics remain, despite Linklater’s (2009, 134) acknowledgement of such concerns. What remains important here, is that this tradition inevitably normatively privileges the abstract individual human as moral subject, in accord with, even if in a different manner to, the more straightforward liberalism of an Ignatieff or Rodin. Linklater’s account of harm is, though, of great value to this project because of his sociological emphasis, rooted in his account of Norbert Elias (Linklater 2007, 160–77; also Hobson 2012b). This has some obvious overlaps with the stress in this book on the diversity of social practices, locations, scales, and spaces. Linklater (2007) picks up on key examples—indigenous peoples and minority nations—as well as the historical diversity of human political communities and the need to appreciate the political realities and challenges of lived experience. However, those communities typically remain those that are most easily conceptualized within fairly standard sovereign territorial terms, with the central challenge being ‘how far cosmopolitan harm conventions can be developed in the world of states . . . and how far they [citizens of separate states] can progress together in establishing robust cosmopolitan conventions that protect individuals everywhere from cross-border or transnational harm’ (Linklater 2007, 129). At heart, as with the wider distributive justice debate, this is a perspective that privileges the universal-individual ends of the ethical spectrum. Unlike the universal-individual approach to distributive justice questions, it is impossible for a revived pluralism to prescribe an end point to a perfectly just world order. Even Linklater’s sociological, as opposed to analytic philosophical, approach brings with it clear elements of prescription, because of the Habermasian dynamic and the universal-individual framing of the problem. The lack of an end point is a significant drawback, as it clearly makes it harder to measure progress from the injustice of the here and now to the justice of the 175

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there and then. This, though, is a function of pluralism’s scepticism about the possibility of defining the there and then of a just world order. Assessment can only be in terms of direction of travel, not in terms of attainment of a predefined outcome. This reflects the fact that the there and then exists in multiple dimensions because of the multiple community memberships that people inhabit and which grant meaning and value to their lives and shape the ethical judgements they reach in community with other people, rather than just as a singular individual within a single humanity. My tests of openness and dynamism in relation to those communities apply, such that the direction of travel in terms of distributive justice are assessed in favour of a balance of more open, more dynamic communities, and that requires substantially greater equality in the distribution of resources and services than is presently the case in the world. But, because the nature of community is itself dynamic—as globalization is demonstrating with the substantial and dramatic effects in the way in which people engage in social relations as a result of a technological revolution in communication—and the nature of resource and service is also dynamic, prescriptive outcomes are impossible. When we debate global distributive justice, pluralism highlights that what is to be distributed (wealth, goods, services) are not static concepts that exist in a cultural and communal vacuum. Distributive justice is, therefore, problematic for a revived pluralism, although not as problematic as it is for traditional pluralism, which had almost nothing to say on the matter beyond limited concerns about the potential for economic inequality to engender disorder in international society. The English school focus on international society means that issue does, to some extent, retain a role: the tension between order and justice with which I entered this chapter is significant to the way that I think about how distributive injustice can impact on the level of international society. But a revived pluralism can go much further, in tune with Weinert’s appeal to ‘go micro’, by understanding how the complex ethical tensions over distributive justice issues play in a multidimensional space in which human community memberships generate competing pressures that are not resolvable through assessment against a singular universal-individual standard. Privileging some over others, granting some more access to consideration than others, hearing some voices more loudly than others, and wanting to help some more than others are ethical in the sense that they are an inescapable part of any plausible human ethic because they are an inescapable part of living in communities and engaging in the activity of community. This discursive element is, of course, present in the universal-individual account of distributive justice—Ignatieff ’s (2012) version emphasizes that a continuous discursive justification of political action is the key means through which a global ethic inserts itself into political discourse—but the deck is 176

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stacked to ensure that those who might reject the universal-individual position, for religious reasons or nationalist reasons, for example, must, over time, give up those proclivities. Even for Linklater, with his sophisticated sociology rooted in claims about the empirical fact of immanent fellow feeling across human communities (2007, 178–90), the ethical immanence that animates our hopes for a better future is that of universalism. That all societies contain within them the potential to recognize harm suffered by others gives Linklater’s scheme its empirical bedrock upon which the philosophical defence and advocacy of universalism can be built. This is, surely, thin beer. It is a long way from an anthropologically demonstrable capability to recognize harm (itself understood in a limited manner) to a system of global distributive justice predicated upon individual rights. When we consider other, similar, seemingly universal characteristics of human societies—the capacity for differentiation and exclusion, even, regrettably, cruelty, we may pause for thought about the ways that immanence plays out, especially in an era of multiple and dynamic community memberships. A revived pluralism is not deterministic in this fashion, although it is, clearly, firmly rooted in an account of ethics that sees it as a discursive activity and one that is assessed at multiple scales and in multiple dimensions through the experience of people. It is also one that seeks to promote to a due prominence in international ethical debates the view from the subaltern—a ‘view from somewhere’ that is nevertheless progressive and radical, as opposed to the ‘view from somewhere’ of traditional pluralism, which is the view from the established top table of international society.

Conclusion This chapter has sought to demonstrate that a revived pluralism can tackle contemporary issues in international relations that are often seen as the domain of cosmopolitan ethics, particularly when seeking to establish a progressive viewpoint. Instead, a revived pluralism is able to recognize the significance of social, economic, political, and technological innovation and transformation for core aspects of world politics. Recasting security in terms of the human individual, engaging with the transformation in military activity being wrought by the technological innovation of drones, and addressing profound challenges of distributive justice are all issues that have the potential to set normative debates that will endure for decades to come. They will continue to inspire political theorists, moral philosophers, civil society activists, governmental officials, and ordinary citizens to take up struggles, both peaceful and violent, that will make ethical claims and demand ethical assessment. They will cause people to act, and that is to cause people to take a stand, 177

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to speak out, to participate in a political life that is necessarily ethical because it is about engagement with others. It is about practising the verb ‘to community’. Pluralism’s contribution across the three issues discussed has been, though, to emphasize the multidimensional nature of this process. This comes across most clearly in the distinction made between a revived pluralist ‘middle way’ on distributive justice, contrasted with a standard cosmopolitan response that seeks to emphasize the normative superiority of a position based on the two end points of the possible spectrum—the universal-individual, as I have termed it. Invoking the ‘middle way’, of course, is designed to reinforce the claim made throughout this book that a revived pluralism remains a part of the English school tradition. At one level, this could be dismissed as a rhetorical trick. The language of the ‘middle way’ is something of a charade in that the account of ethics offered here and the way in which it has been applied to individual security, targeted killing, and distributive justice is at odds with an English school approach that is focused on the international society of states and which pitches its level of analysis at a very different point to the claims made here about the centrality of ‘community’. Obviously, I want to resist such charges, but to do so on a positive basis. The ‘middle way’ aspect of this argument is about asserting the potential for ethical analysis and normative ambition available from a reformulated notion of the middle ground. My analysis of the three issues discussed in this chapter is clearly at odds with the traditional account of the ‘middle ground’ being between a morality of raison d’état and a morality of Kantian cosmopolitanism. But neither is it ‘Grotianism’: intended to signify an emphasis on social consensus amongst a privileged class of state actors, manifesting itself ultimately in enforceable law. Recent discussions of ‘middle-ground ethics’, led by Cornelia Navari’s (2013) edited collection, are more in tune with my ambitions here, but typically retain the statist focus that a revived pluralism wants to downplay in favour of a focus on community as being the key normative category for a properly pluralist account. Further, as this chapter has emphasized, pluralism has to be able to adequately engage with the full range of diverse communities engaged in ethical debates that are shaping and being shaped by the dynamics of not just an international society of states but also by dynamics of globalization. Community as our ‘level of analysis’ offers far greater flexibility for analysis than the traditional English school account of international system, international society, and world society, or Buzan’s (2004) reformulation of those categories, whilst nevertheless retaining them within analytical purview. To argue for community is not to reject the state or international society but instead to recognize that their normative significance is as distinctive forms of this wider category and that there is a vastly

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greater range of communities engaged with and by world politics than those allow. Most importantly, however, is the way that the examples considered in this chapter reiterate the pluralist claim about the normative desirability of ethical diversity and the need to recognize the value in the ethical diversity of human communities—at least up to a point. There are community-based perspectives on all of the issues considered that are not ethically defensible within a revived pluralist position, especially those that simply refuse to accept the relevance of ethical claims in relation to security, killing, or access to resources and services that are made by those outside of the community to which a specific individual sees themselves as belonging. Such extreme positions are likely to be very rare, both because they are not very persuasive but also because of the way that humans are almost never a member of only one ethically significant and relevant community when it comes to thinking about how to respond to complex issues in world politics. We get more active political engagement, better ethical debate, and, ultimately, more effective and accountable political decision making when we acknowledge and respect the diversity of ethical thought about complex topics. Ethical dilemmas are real in relation to security, targeted killing, and distributive justice. Politics resolves them, insofar as they are resolvable, in ways that are philosophically messy, temporary, and reflective of power distributions amongst the different community perspectives engaged. Hence the emphasis in this chapter, building on Chapter 4, on the opportunity for pluralism to seek to press the subaltern position. The ethics of traditional pluralism and, arguably, the universal-individual position, are both over-reliant on assumptions about the universal acceptance of certain basic ethical claims about the nature of the world, and of the place of the individual human within it. That weakens their ability to portray and advocate for the weakest in international relations. Whether it be Ayoob’s ‘subaltern realism’ that accepts the potential for the strong state to be the liberator of the poor and oppressed in the world, or Ignatieff ’s global civil society NGOs motivated by universal human rights as a way to represent the poor and oppressed, neither argument seems especially interested in alternative, competing accounts or ones that draw on different ethical scales from, respectively, the state and the universal-individual. Here is pluralism’s strength on these issues. It is not to romanticize community or the position of the subaltern: there is no romance in grinding poverty, the impact of a hellfire missile, or systematic and brutal repression on the basis of gender, for example. It is, though, to recognize that the perspective on these situations held by those who experience them, and the ways in which they seek to build mechanisms and strategies of resistance against legitimizing discourses and policies offers a crucial, critical insight that ethicists seeking to understand and

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assess political activity need to weigh heavily—more heavily than they do at present, in the great majority of cases. The normative dimension of English school theory remains critical to its position in the wider canon of international relations theory, yet this dimension has either been bracketed out in the most significant recent debates, as with Buzan’s work, or has been seen as more or less taken for granted, in the sense that normative progression must be cosmopolitan. Plausible alternatives to either of these two strategies are basically absent, and the challenge from Buzan and Weinert, to take exemplars of the two strategies, has been to ask for a rejoinder from normative pluralists, which is something this book is selfconsciously designed to offer. It is, therefore, appropriate in a final chapter to sum up the way in which the English school tradition looks from the perspective of a revived pluralism, to reassert some of the core claims made so far and to think about the way in which the further development of a revived pluralist project might take place.

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Introduction The (over)ambition for this book is to ‘save pluralism from itself ’; challenging the statist, conservative portrayal of the pluralist dimension of English school theory in a way that seeks to establish it as a progressive, even radical, position. At the same time, I have taken into account developments in contemporary English school theory that have revealed and confirmed the limitations of the traditional pluralist position. The focus throughout has been on the normative element of pluralism but, in line with those contemporary developments, I have sought to produce an account of pluralism that is compatible with the current debates over Buzan’s radical reformulation in pursuit of social structural analytical insights and the ongoing interest in institutions. Above all, though, has been a desire to place at the forefront of a revived pluralism what I have argued always ought to have been there: a commitment to the normative desirability of the ethical plurality of human communities as they are lived. That has meant far-reaching changes to the traditional pluralist position, certainly, including seeing human communities, and multiple memberships of human communities, as being the analytical and normative focus for pluralism, in recognition of the profound changes to the conduct of politics being brought about by economic, sociological, technological, and other transformations driven by that complex mix of place, space, and time-challenging dynamics we bundle up as globalization. A pluralism that is not focused on a narrowly specified and highly statist international society is a big change, but a necessary one for the better. Irrespective of the perceived success of my particular effort at reviving the pluralist position, I have at least established the need for such a revival within English school theory. There will be many who regard a pluralist revival as fundamentally at odds with empirical and normative trends towards a form of global unity that will be unique in recorded human history and which will come to fruition in the course of the current century. A world society, in

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Buzan’s terms, will fundamentally transcend the ‘Westphalian’ international society that has provided an analytical reference point for understanding getting on for half a millennia of international politics, and will make normative analysis and ethical assessment in terms of a single, universal set of standards an actuality, rather than an aspiration. If this book serves as a pique to further sharpen the already highly impressive analytical acuity of this strand of work, then it will have served a useful purpose. What I have not tried to do, though, is to argue that globalization is not happening, does not matter, or is parasitical upon the continuing existence of a Westphalian international society to such an extent that its growth and extent is necessarily and severely limited by the prior need to sustain such a system broadly within its current parameters. Of course, I hope to have done more than provide a useful target for English school solidarists and other cosmopolitans tired of taking easy shots at traditional pluralist analyses. The purpose of this final chapter is to attempt a survey of the English school landscape as it looks from the perspective atop a revived pluralism to pick out other key contours that come into view, such that the advantages of adopting such a perspective are more firmly established. There are three issues that will drive this assessment and these will follow the classic English school structure, offering an assessment of how a revived pluralism contributes across the spectrum of English school theory. The first is the way in which this form of pluralism serves to reinforce the reformulation of the traditional international system-international societyworld society structure of the English school, by stripping out ‘international system’ as an implausible component in its conventional construction (Buzan 2004, 98–109; Schouenborg 2012, 132–3). The arguments for this move in the existing literature are typically analytical, but the claim here is a normative one: the misleading association of pluralism with a normatively mute realism established by the realist-international system connection should be broken. This reduces pluralism’s excessive statism and serves to broaden the normative horizons of a pluralist position by removing the tendency to assume that it must, at root, be about order amongst states in the face of the dangers of sliding into the Hobbesian abyss of an international system. Second, I will look at international society. This has already been discussed extensively in Chapters 3 and 4 in particular, so there is no intention to recover that ground here, but this section will consolidate an account of a pluralist international society that shows just how far pluralism has moved through this reformulation. In particular, it is within this element of the English school framework that arguably the most radical alterations take place, and it is valuable to highlight this through a consolidated statement of contrasts.

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Finally, the case for a pluralist world society will be summarized. A central theme of the book has been the need to engage with the multiple community memberships that characterize human experience and I have concentrated on those communities that are most relevant to and prominent in international relations as a social practice. This has, inevitably, downplayed forms of community that are less associated with international relations. I cannot hope to offer a comprehensive assessment of the potential significance of multiple community memberships in this section, but I will pick up on the benefits, and costs, of seeking to incorporate a far wider range of community memberships within an English school account, as well as the normative imperative of ‘community’ as a verb that has also been prominent in the discussion so far. This is also an opportunity to engage further with what, to my mind, is the most compelling statement of a solidarist normative case—Andrew Linklater’s work on cosmopolitan harm conventions. Finally, the chapter will conclude some unanswered questions and challenges for further development of a revived pluralism. I hope to set an agenda for subsequent research in areas where progress seems most important in establishing the benefits of restoring pluralism to its rightful position within English school theory: as a vibrant, well-grounded, and normatively progressive counterpart to and interlocutor with solidarism. That is not to call for a recreation of the sterility of a ‘pluralist-solidarist divide’ in which such locution was presumed to be impossible or fruitless. Weinert (2011) and others have produced a compelling case for the limitations of that analytical approach. This is not about replacing solidarism with pluralism—I am sceptical about such theoretical and philosophical certainty being attainable—but it is about the need for meaningful and substantial critical dialogue between the positions. Pluralism has been unable to provide that effectively for too long because it has failed to take seriously what ought to be its principal contribution: a normative defence of plurality.

International System The standard portrayal of ‘international system’ in English school theory—as a condition in which states have to take one another into account in their calculations, but in which there are no meaningful shared norms, principles, or interests—has been effectively criticized for being of extremely limited analytical value. Buzan’s (2004, 98–109) argument is that such asocial interstate interaction is fantastically rare in recorded history, and perhaps needs to be thought about in fictional terms. I find this claim compelling: human beings have only rarely, if ever, lived in conditions that actually approximate an international system as classically defined in English school theory. The 183

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traditional pluralist argument in favour of very great caution in altering the norms and rules of international society for fear of pitching states onto a slippery slope to Hobbesianism is significantly weakened when the image of that abyss of war, violence, and chaos is revealed as a mirage. That is not to argue for the invulnerability of international society or deny the ability of human beings to construct and implement political projects that are massively destructive, but it is to defend the idea that justifications for preserving a currently existing status quo that is manifestly unjust ought not to be mounted on the basis that the only likely alternative is Hobbesianism. A lack of social structural analytical utility is not, in and of itself, a reason for normative rejection, though. After all, advocates of universal human rights or a world political order supportive of peace have sustained their claims about the normative validity of their position in the face of decades, centuries even, in which such eventualities appeared fantastically distant, even in the heartlands of the European Enlightenment that give them their most familiar intellectual forms. The methodological choices that underpin this project do, though, make this more of a problem for a revived pluralism than it is for a Kantian cosmopolitanism. Those choices do help explain why the rejection of the utility of the traditional account of international system is a positive normative choice for a revived pluralism: an international system is an arena in which the exclusion of non-state actors is at its most extreme and in which a narrow logic of state security achieves almost complete dominance. The repressive, regressive, elitist discourse this engenders supresses discursive space within which alternative political scales—community is, of course, particularly important here—challenge established logics. The normative touchstones of revived pluralism—sclerosis and radical exclusion engendering intolerance—can all too easily come to characterize public debate under these circumstances. Those unable or unwilling to speak the language seen as crucial to entrance to the debate are excluded, vilified, or persecuted. Those whose reference points are not the same, or who seek to challenge or critique the values embedded in the security discourse, are marginalized and treated as treacherous. Their marginalization easily extends into repression and, on occasion, identification for extermination on the basis of their failure or refusal to assimilate to dominant values. These processes are not limited to totalitarian dictatorships and radical nationalist projects. They can be found within the political discourse of established democracies. A classic instance of such closure leading to the denial of the validity of alternative perspectives and critical discourse is Carol Cohn’s (1987) still striking analysis of the language of defence intellectuals in the last years of the Cold War. Cohn’s (1987, 711–12) most memorable, and telling, claim is that the object of security amongst the ‘nuclear priesthood’ was not the United States, its citizens, or its values, but the nuclear 184

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weapons themselves. The dehumanizing abstraction of the defence debate of that period provides a telling and powerful illustration of the tendency of the logic of ‘international system’ to sclerosis and intolerance. This is perhaps even more striking than the ability of the language to conflate destruction and creation; to domesticate and sexualize the threat of nuclear war in ways that render it trivial. The defence debate Cohn described is, as she notes (1987, 712–13), akin to believing six impossible things before breakfast— understanding the moral and political view of an exclusive elite as the only possible, acceptable, and authoritative account of a strategic ‘reality’ divorced from reality and in which adoption of the accepted language of debate shuts off alternative perspectives. Cohn’s claim is that this is particularly true of those perspectives that wish to recognize, even emphasize, the human destruction that would inevitably follow any use of nuclear weapons: death, injury, illness, and desolation on barely imaginable scales. As well as reiterating the way in which narrative is so important to establishing the basis for normative engagement, including denying the possibility of such engagement, this move to reject the asocial account of interstate interaction in traditional definitions of international system breaks the strong association between pluralism and a realism that is seen as being the theoretical framework of choice for understanding international system. This is a further reason why Cohn’s classic study is useful here. In the international system of strategic nuclear deterrence in which it is the nuclear weapons of the United States against the nuclear weapons of the Soviet Union, ‘realism’ provides the theoretical backdrop; so, too, for the international system in traditional pluralism. This linkage takes a variety of forms, none of which, I want to suggest, are useful or appropriate, but which need some consideration to establish why this is the case, and why it matters. First, and perhaps most easily dismissed, is the terminological lexicon of the English school, indebted to Martin Wight (1991), in which international system is aligned with ‘realism’, in the way in which international society is aligned with ‘rationalism’ and world society with ‘revolutionism’. The ‘great thinkers’ version of Wight’s scheme does the same: associating ‘international system’ with Hobbes reinforces the connection to realism because of the way in which Hobbes continues to be routinely cited as an important intellectual precursor to the realist position. The commonplace notion within English school theory that pluralism is closer to the ‘international system’ end of the spectrum therefore sees it as guilty, as it were, by association. This damages the normative credentials of a pluralist position because of the way that realism is often associated with amoralism—cue familiar selected quotes from Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Thucydides, as ostensible intellectual fathers of the realist tradition (for critical evaluation of this not very persuasive story, see Donnelly 2000). 185

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The notion of realism as an intellectual tradition characterized by amoralism is, of course, essentially bogus. Structural realism may be disinterested in normative theory, but classical realism most certainly is interested. With Morgenthau’s work being increasingly recognized for its complex and sophisticated engagement with ethical and normative questions (e.g. Scheuerman 2009, especially 51–65), the value of a realist contribution to ethical thinking about international relations has received renewed interest (e.g. Rosenthal 1991). Notions of ‘ethical realism’ (Lieven and Hulsman 2006) may once have been thought to be oxymoronic, but no longer. Nevertheless, realism’s ethical perspective, as well as its analytical one, is state centric, pessimistic about the possibility of progress, or fatalistic about the ‘tragic’ nature of international relations (e.g. Erskine and Lebow 2012; Paipais 2013; Scheuerman 2009, 54–7). Consequently, whilst the bases for seeing connections between realism and traditional pluralism, perhaps especially in James Mayall’s (2000) argument about the limits of progress, are present, the embedded connection in the basic analytical framework of the English school is highly problematic for a revived pluralism, which rejects the methodological and normative propositions upon which realism rests. The need for this challenge is reinforced by Richard Little’s (2000) well-known and important account of the English school’s methodological pluralism, which associates international system with a positivist, empiricist approach that he sees exemplified by realism. Such a methodological approach, resisted by this book, may not be straightforwardly hostile to normative theory, but it is clearly a rather tougher place in which to work than the self-consciously normative critical methodology Little (2000) advocates as underpinning the analysis of world society. Realism, and by extension pluralism, are left a distant normative second by the conventional English school tripartite structure. Buzan’s reformulation, in doing away with ‘international system’ in its conventional form as being analytically useless, is normatively welcome, too. We can do without the category because asocial interaction is just about impossible and certainly exceptionally rare. In almost every example of interaction between independent political communities that we can find there has been some form or other of international society, displaying the classic characteristics of shared rules, norms, and institutions of behaviour, whose maintenance is accepted as being in the common good. Buzan (2004, 139–60) goes on to use ‘pluralism’ as a way of describing ‘weak’ forms of such international societies, with limited rules and norms, underdeveloped institutions in only the most essential of behavioural realms, and a concept of common good that does not extend too much beyond the avoidance of general, system-wide war. That is of little use to this project, of course, and whilst Buzan usefully recycles familiar English school terms in ways that make sense for his purposes, there seems no obvious reason why normatively laden terms such as pluralism and 186

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solidarism need to be adopted. His account would work just as well with ‘weak’ and ‘strong’, ‘shallow’ and ‘deep’, ‘thin’ and ‘thick’ as the end points of the spectrum that defines types of international society, freeing ‘pluralist’ and ‘solidarist’ to retain normative significance. That significance, at least as far as pluralism is concerned, is now detached from a specific international social structural order—international system—and instead rooted in a normative commitment to the ethical desirability of diverse human communities operating at a range of scales and with simultaneous multiple community memberships. This is connected to the state as one, very important, form of community, but not necessarily so, as it is for traditional pluralism. In order to fully exploit the potential of a revived pluralism the English school needs to confirm the setting aside of Wight’s categorization and the familiar structure of international system-international society-world society that he developed. Pluralism is not a variety of realism and whilst it is certainly possible to see it as being informed by the ethical insights of classical realism, in relation to an understanding of the complexity of statecraft and the challenges of leadership in the context of interstate relations, that is far from being the limits of its ethical purview or normative vision. Indeed, it ought to be the normative purview most frequently in its line of fire, for such a perspective rarely champions the subaltern or is open to a multiplicity of communitybased perspectives that challenge, subvert, and compromise the supposed centrality of the state and the presumptive ethical importance of the preservation of its security.

International Society The impact of a revived pluralism on international society is a central concern of this book and the plausibility of seeing my argument as contributing to moving forward the research agenda of the English school as a distinctive theoretical approach. Consequently, the issue has already received extensive consideration in Chapters 3 and 4 in particular. The conclusion to emphasize at this stage is how this argument detaches pluralism from being either an analytical category that describes a particular pole of international society, as it is for Buzan, or a normative claim linked to the prior need to establish order amongst sovereign states operating in a world characterized by the empirical fact of ethically diverse human communities, as it is for traditional pluralists. Pluralism, in the sense developed here, is a fundamental ontological and normative claim about the nature of the world—inspired by the insights of Arendt (1958, 1964, 1972, 1973a, 1973b) and the contemporary sociology of a writer such as Gerard Delanty (2011)—such that the normative significance of international society does not rest on its ability to generate order under 187

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conditions of plurality and anarchy, but on its ability to enable plurality to manifest itself politically in a normatively defensible way. Order is, of course, an element of that, given the importance of order as an ethical value to all human communities, but it is neither static nor coterminous with the current constellation of rules, norms, and principles of behaviour that are accepted by the society of states. One of my principal claims is that the society of states is but one manifestation of communal memberships and associated ethical schemas in world politics, and its privileging by traditional pluralists is neither analytically appropriate nor normatively sustainable. As such, a revived pluralism somewhat counterintuitively falls into line with solidarism as it has come to be defined in most conventional English school theory: as a normative proposition about an ideal world that enables analytical identification and ethical assessment of current trends in international political practice, with a particular—but not exclusive—focus on the practice of sovereign states.1 Both solidarism and a revived pluralism are interested in globalization, global civil society, capitalism, regionalism, and the familiar panoply of multiactor, multiscalar dynamics. Yet they differ over basic ontological and normative claims, enabling a far more effective and fruitful engagement to take place between them. Neither, yet, is completely compelling either in terms of their fundamental philosophical arguments and associated ethical judgements, nor, and of rather greater interest to the English school, in their ability to capture the range and relative significance of competing normative claims. In relation to the first of these incomplete tasks, I have defended a position that pluralism is philosophically, sociologically, and methodologically plausible, in the sense that an absolute standard of philosophical proof is unattainable. On my assessment, it is at least as, if not more, plausible than the liberal cosmopolitanism that underpins most English school solidarism. My argument in relation to the second incomplete task is stronger: that a revived pluralism is superior to most solidarism because it has a clear advantage in capturing ethical complexity and enabling normative assessment that has greater purchase on contemporary world politics. Here, the willingness of pluralism to transcend the universal-individual framework of liberal versions of solidarism (which are the dominant ones in English school theory) is crucial. That transcendence is not rejection—a revived pluralism acknowledges the extent to which understanding oneself as an individual member of humankind creates a vital (in both senses) ethical perspective on world politics. Similarly, pluralism understands how that perspective motivates many people to carry out acts of selflessness and colours their perception of the obligations they, and those who govern them, can and do owe on the basis 1 For useful summaries of the pluralism and solidarism that are in general accord with this position see Buzan (2014).

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of human solidarity. The community of humankind has its place in a revived pluralism, whether that be in relation to the redistribution of wealth to address arbitrary yet crippling privation; alleviation of suffering arising from war or natural disaster; or outrage at the unaccountable use of violence by one state against the citizens of another on the basis of untested evidence via opaque and partial processes that deny natural justice. However, pluralism also understands and values the communal caveats, overrides, and dilemmas that accompany such universalism, and does not regard these as necessarily inferior. When we feel the moral pull to help those who are suffering an absolutely lesser level of suffering than others (if such things can be meaningfully measured) as a result of geographical proximity, shared religious faith, common gender, ideological alignment, economic interdependence, or technological connectivity, that is not a morally inferior pull to help than that exercised by universal humanity. Owing obligations and duties to those whose shared membership of our communities helps to constitute us as moral agents and with whom we engage in political action is not ethically trivial or subordinate to what we must owe others on the basis of universal rights. We can, do, and should privilege, and we can, do, and should feel the moral dilemmas that arise from facing ethical choices about when, how, why, and who to privilege. Pluralism sees this not as an empirical claim—that such dilemmas exist—but as ethically desirable. We test our moral intuitions and ethical schemas arising from multiple community memberships against one another and against those of others in this way. International society, as usually understood by the English school, is one way in which such partial, communal feelings operate—in that its debates manifest these tensions. Even cursory familiarity with the English school literature on humanitarian intervention (e.g. Bellamy 2003, 2009; Wheeler 2000) is enough to establish this normative tension within international society. A revived pluralism, unlike solidarism, does not assume that progress requires the resolution of this tension in favour of a universal-individual outcome. Moral dilemmas, normative tensions, and complex political dynamics operating across multiple communities are not just a fact of political life in world politics, they are ethically desirable. That desirability stems from the revived pluralist claim about the roots of ethics in an account of the good human life that stresses political action, in Arendt’s (1958) sense, and the necessity of the trusting company of those with whom we are able to build a community or, in a globalizing world, communities. The normative value of international society is thus both derivative—as it is for solidarists—in that it contributes (and detracts) from the ability of humans to lead good lives, and inherent—as it is not for solidarists—because states represent one form of that ‘community-ing’ process through which those good lives are led.

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This account of international society is able to both encompass solidarist ethical ideals and extend them. The ethical principle of toleration manifested in terms of the condemnation of sclerotic and radically exclusionary social systems is sufficiently strong to encompass explanation of the most widely accepted global norms (such as prohibitions on torture, genocide, slavery, crimes against humanity, and war crimes) and provide compelling endorsement of them. It also offers insight into the ethical (un)desirability of the world political manifestations of a great variety of political projects, from human rights to religiously motivated terrorism, and which consistently connects these to the centrality and multiplicity of human community and the tensions that arise from multiple community memberships. This book has not been particularly kind to the expression of pluralism associated with Hedley Bull’s work, but there is here an acceptance of the point made in The Hagey Lectures (1983, 13): ‘[G]iven the developing liberal traditions of the Western democracies, some degree of commitment to the cause of human rights on a world scale must follow. Our own moral premise requires it.’ But, he also noted in the same text (Bull 1983, 11), ‘[W]hen we come to formulate our own ideas about justice in international relations, we should . . . not proceed as if our own ideas were bound to command general assent.’ That is a useful rule of thumb at one level, but it needs to be borne in mind that Bull is pitching this heuristic at the level of interstate relations: within the confines of an international society as usually understood. A revived pluralism would endorse and extend the sentiment: in recognition that the moral premises of individuals and the consequent ideas about justice are typically in conflict as a result of multiple community memberships and the need to navigate a difficult, unstable, and ethically imperfect path between sometimes contradictory demands. International society is therefore about much more than the society of states. However, the English school’s core insight into the distinctive way in which political units claiming sovereignty have operated to identify, debate, contest, promote, secure, and alter a shared concept of the common good amongst themselves ensures that international society retains its position as the principal analytical object of English school theory. For a revived pluralism, though, this is a pragmatic judgement about the location of certain key dynamics in world politics that particularly affect a number of core ethical issues. These include: the location and nature of authority; particularly destructive forms of political violence; resource ownership and distribution; and manifestations of notions of human agency and political community. It is also a pragmatic judgement about the arena in which the most significant political units for the protection of pluralism operate most intensely. What it is not, therefore, is some sort of article of faith about the social structure of world politics or the necessity of certain forms of political institution. 190

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The costs of this move are obvious, in terms of the increased analytical complexity it engenders by greatly extending the range of political communities international society should concern itself with. That runs counter to my earlier claim to be, broadly, in tune with the social structural reworking of English school theory led by Buzan. He organizes these non-state elements into the interhuman and transnational domains, and that analytical logic is, to my mind, broadly sound. Buzan is aware that these domains interact in analytical terms—his project serves to help overcome the English school’s analytical blindness to globalization—and the argument here is that this interaction is normatively inescapable, too (for more detail see Williams 2011). Indeed, the analytical separation Buzan offers is very difficult to replicate in normative theory within a revived pluralism. Analysis will, of necessity, be limited to certain communities in any particular instance, and I have suggested how that selection can be made: start with those least advantaged by the social structural arrangements in place. That marks a sharp change in most English school analysis which starts and finishes, all too often, with the most advantaged. International society is of immense significance, and the English school account of it has many advantages, particularly if the potential for normative insight and analysis is retained, enhanced, and promoted, rather than sidelined. This is a key goal of this project and one that I have argued pluralism is especially well suited to achieving. That may not be a particular surprise, given that this is the arena where pluralism was traditionally strong, even if for some rather poor reasons. Nevertheless, a revived pluralism does offer a distinctive account of international society with significant advantages over traditional pluralism. A sterner test is the claim that pluralism also offers a compelling account of world society.

World Society By a world society we understand not merely a degree of interaction linking all parts of the human community to one another, but a sense of common interest and common values on the basis of which common rules and institutions may be built. The concept of world society, in this sense, stands to the totality of global social interaction as our concept of international society stands to the concept of the international system. (Bull 1977, 279)

Bull’s comparatively rarely used definition of world society, certainly by contrast with the frequently quoted definition of international society, is arguably little help to traditional pluralism or contemporary solidarism. ‘The totality of 191

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global social interaction’ is rather a lot for a theoretical concept to contain. Buzan’s splitting of this into the interhuman (mainly about collective identity) and the transnational (mainly about technological and economic connections) helps up to a point, but only to a point. Neither is the identification of an analogous relationship with the international system-international society relationship useful when we have done away with the normative (and analytical) utility of the international system category. Certainly, it seems difficult to imagine a world in which the totality of human social interaction was sufficient that everyone needed to take everyone else into account in making decisions, yet did not share any meaningful concept of common good or shared values at any scale. Such a world would have to have, at the least, quite a rich nexus of sub-global shared values, otherwise it is difficult to imagine a social system that was sufficiently robust for technological development to have taken place to a level whereby people could be aware of the extent of human population such that Bull’s global level would have any purchase at all. ‘[L]inking all parts of the human community to one another’ is usually seen as referring to the individual parts—i.e. individual human beings. This is one of the reasons why world society is typically seen as the domain of the cosmopolitan. ‘The totality of global social interaction’ is therefore grasped as being the interaction of individual people. This is the universal-individual framework discussed in Chapter 5. That totality, I have argued, is not necessarily best understood as interhuman, in the sense of inter-individual humans. Instead, the argument has been for the normative desirability of world society as the totality of interhuman communities interaction. That can include the individual human level, but is not restricted to it and neither is that level granted normative privilege. Bull’s ‘parts of the human community’ could just as well be communities. That does not especially assist with the problem Bull’s definition creates of the potential volume of activity that the concept of world society is seeking to contain. It does, though, give traction on the normative challenge of assessing that action because a revived pluralism offers a basis upon which to consider and assess interhuman communities activity and a set of normative analytical tools to apply in reaching normative judgements about that activity. In contrast with Buzan’s analytical reworking of world society, which aims to enable sub-global analysis of the intensity and direction of developments in interhuman and transnational sectors to be assessed regionally, the approach suggested in Chapter 5 is for normative analysis to be more functionally oriented: looking at key issue areas that motivate ethical and normative debate that challenges statist framings. Human security, targeted killing, and distributive justice questions all do that and I have set out how it is that a revived pluralism offers distinctive insights into them. This is not ‘taking geography 192

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back out’ in response to Buzan’s (2004, 205–26) ‘bringing geography back in’—because geographical variation in the normative reference points for functional assessment are still likely to vary. Instead, this approach augments the need to recognize regionalism in analytical terms focused around the extent of institutional integration. It also enables us to recognize the different balance of reference points involved in institutions as durable social practices. For instance, the point made in relation to targeted killing that critical analysis in Western scholarship refracts the experience of Pakistanis, Yemenis, and others through the lens of human rights and international law, rarely drawing on the rich, sophisticated, and ethically powerful tradition of Islam to contribute to an assessment of the ethics of this practice. Resistance as an institution reminds us to look for the local, subaltern practice and discourse in relation to a policy like drone strikes. ‘Community’ has emerged as the key term for a normative account of a pluralist world society. This is the case both in relation to the analytical purchase this gives and in terms of the normative logic that pluralism seeks to restore to centre stage. Thinking about world society in analytical terms has tended to stress the need to be able to encompass non-state actors, ranging from human rights NGOs, through transnational commercial organizations (licit and illicit), to international organizations, civil society movements, and so on. Understanding the different institutional (in the English school sense) logics of these groups helps explain how they relate to international society as the other key constellation of English school theory. For example, the relationship between capitalism and sovereignty is key to explaining the nature, role, and effectiveness of a host of regulatory organizations engaged with commercial bodies. Normative engagement with this relationship focuses around community. The claim of community to be central is twofold. First, and more importantly, is the way in which the concept of community helps to keep in focus that world politics is a human politics and that politics is a critically important aspect of lived human experience. Second, and following from this, community typically brings with it an invitation to normative assessment. The term carries with it positive normative connotations that can provide a useful starting point for normative engagement with the analytical assessment we may offer of the significance of non-state actors, scales, and activity that are the usual focus of world society analysis. Understanding community as a verb as well as a noun inherently asks normative questions about the purpose of the community and the nature, quality, and extent of its internal debates and discourse that grant it normative standing through the role it plays in enabling members to gain their sense of place and belonging in the world. That assessment must be a critical one, looking for and understanding how communities

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renew and reinvigorate themselves through self-reflection upon lived experience and through engagement and interaction with other communities. What, of course, is central to this account of a pluralist world society is the multiplicity of community memberships that characterize politics and ethics. This is at the core of the irresolvability of so many ethical debates about world politics. Perspective matters, not in a mechanical ‘where you stand depends on where you sit’ sense, but in the sense of appreciation for the different normative imperatives pulling individuals in sometimes diametrically opposing directions as a result of their stake in multiple communities in relation to complex issues. Pluralism does not claim to be able to resolve these dilemmas—they are dilemmas for the reason of their irresolvability—and does not profess to be the sort of ethical theory that enables, or at least claims to enable, definitive answers to practical ethical questions. It establishes ethical preferences—the preference for openness over sclerosis, for engagement over exclusion, for tolerance over intolerance—and can use those to assess different courses of action. However, it is likely to be rare that completely clear-cut answers emerge considering the variety of levels and the range of spheres in which world politics operates. Those that do will likely find plenty of other ethical propositions in their support, too, including from those more likely to assert that their philosophical position identifies the morally right course of action that all must follow. Pluralist condemnation of genocide and apartheid joins rights-based condemnations. The first step in dealing with complexity, though, is to recognize and accept that a situation is complex and that good arguments can be found for different outcomes and conclusions. Choosing is what counts in ethics—especially in an account that emphasizes ethics as rooted in lived experience. Hard choices between competing, contradictory imperatives, or based on uncertainty over future outcomes, or where no ‘good’ options appear to be available are sometimes the only choices available. Therefore, one area where traditional and revived pluralism overlap is in urging a degree of understanding, perhaps even sympathy, for those who have to choose, albeit for rather different reasons and with a revived pluralism offering a much wider perspective on who counts as having to choose. The range of choosers is much greater than elite statesmen and women who are traditional pluralism’s constituency. Revived pluralism has far greater concern for and sympathy with those who choose under conditions of weakness, not strength. For example, those who face choices about how to feed their families and protect them from corrupt police officials demanding shares of their crops on the basis of their being members of a minority community, yet feeling the need to fulfil religious obligations to offer charity to co-religionists across the arbitrary border that divides their community between sovereign states, and who want to help their eldest daughter to go abroad to 194

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study with their second cousin in Europe so that she might have greater opportunities. Those who have to choose between upholding traditions that honour their forebears but which they believe to be injurious to the future life chances of their children as a result of their having engaged with NGO representatives from another country that is working in their area with the support of their government, but in the face of opposition from local religious leaders. Those who have to choose whether to work online to assist expatriate nationals trying to challenge an established government that is providing economic support to their own government in return for access to raw materials that are being extracted in environmentally destructive ways and who repress opponents of the access deal. Those who have to make such complex choices without the benefit of a completed primary education, or without the ability to access social support networks as a result of their fragmentation by foreign occupation, or in the face of sustained economic pressure that necessitates discounting the future in the name of surviving the present, and so on. All of these choices, and the myriad others like them, are located within a social context that is multiscalar and multivariate. Equally, it is also temporally located: people choose, but not in conditions of their own choosing (to paraphrase Marx), and the choices they make today will impact the conditions of future choosing, too. People account for their choices to those with whom they join in communities, as it is in accord with community standards, in consultation with community members, in light of community experience, beliefs, and wisdom that people will choose. When people promise, it is to fellow community members; when they are forgiven, it is by fellow members. This is an explicit echo of Arendt’s argument that it is acts of promising and forgiveness that create moments of certainty in the unpredictable world of political action. It must also be borne in mind, crucially so for this revived pluralist account, that through acting in these ways people also extend and contract, renew and degrade, augment and detract from community as it interacts with other communities in world politics and that these are interactions that people cannot separate themselves from because they are participants in multiple interactions. Assessing the ethical quality of those actions is possible through core criteria of exclusion and sclerosis, seeing these not just as external criteria applied by detached analysts, but as useful ethical heuristics for everyday, lived lives. That process, as politics properly understood must, lacks an end point, some predetermined set of conditions in which people can declare, with Dr Pangloss, that everything is for the best in the best of all possible worlds. Oscar Wilde famously wrote that, ‘A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing. And when Humanity lands there, it looks out, and, seeing a better country, sets sail. Progress is

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the realisation of utopia.’2 A revived pluralism shares that spirit of optimism about identifying a better world than the one we live in (hardly an intellectually demanding task, admittedly, whether in Wilde’s day or now) and about the necessity of a realistic optimism about what is attainable by human beings and the communities they inhabit. It also shares Wilde’s recognition that this is a task without an end: that a perfect world is a pipe dream. In this regard, a revived pluralism can be connected with the most compelling solidarist account; Linklater’s argument in favour of cosmopolitan harm conventions (Linklater 2007, 2011). Linklater stresses the immanence of cosmopolitan harm conventions in the sociological fact of local harm conventions: that all social systems recognize the existence of harm, decry it, and have measures by which it can and ought to be alleviated. What constitutes harm in different social settings varies, although not so extensively as to render the concept essentially void, and physical privation is typically at the centre of notions of harm. All such conventions arise within specific communities, which helps to account for their divergence in certain regards, but their ubiquity and degree of commonality provides a basis for optimism about extending harm conventions to include non-members. Increased interaction brings with it the potential for overcoming arbitrary grounds for excluding non-members from such conventions, recognizing human commonality and the universal nature of certain human attributes, principally the ability to recognize that those suffering harm are deserving of care and protection. The harm conventions of specific societies will coalesce into cosmopolitan ones, sharing philosophical roots as the dynamics of interaction and argumentation play out, broadly in line with Habermasian expectations. As with the journey to Utopia there are many arrivals, but no ultimate destination, and each landing takes us forward and marks a moment of progress. A revived pluralism is sceptical about the narrative of way stations on a progressive path towards an identifiable, if unobtainable, end point. The account of plurality as normatively desirable, the role that it plays in politics, and the multiplicity of community that it engenders, renders progress far more contested and the superiority of cosmopolitan conventions doubtful. World society as an element of English school theory should not accept the necessary normative superiority of the cosmopolitan, because so much that is good—best, even—about human lives comes from community membership. The ‘totality of global social interaction’ is not best grasped, understood, and assessed on the global level alone or even primarily. World politics is community politics and the diversity of those communities, their interaction, interpenetration, cross-fertilization, incommensurability, tension, and their

2

The quote comes from Wilde’s ‘The Soul of Man under Socialism.’

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conflict is the cornerstone of ethical life and the touchstone of a normative vision for world politics. It is, certainly, a far less certain one than most solidarist accounts, but it does retain the power of judgement: progress can be measured and understood through the erosion of radical exclusion and sclerosis amongst the world’s communities, to the benefit of those least advantaged by the present social structures.

Conclusions Restoring pluralism to a central position within the English school is possible, desirable, and important to the continuing development of the entire perspective. All aspects of the English school will benefit from a renewed interest in pluralism, whether the central concerns are analytical, normative, or methodological. Hopefully, this book has gone some way towards establishing that case, saving pluralism from itself. There are, though, inevitably many challenges still ahead for a revived pluralist position. Despite the work done in Chapters 1 and 2 in particular, the methodological reformulation of pluralism is likely to require additional work in the future. I have, in line with the approach to methodology that characterizes the English school as a whole, taken a somewhat eclectic stance. Ideas have been utilized that draw on political philosophy, social theory, sociology, and the intellectual resources of the English school itself. This has established the plausibility of reviving pluralism and demonstrated how the typically extremely weak account of methodology characteristic of traditional pluralism can be effectively addressed. Furthermore, this has been shown to open interesting and insightful lines of enquiry that can revitalize pluralism’s analytical and normative agenda. Such eclecticism also has the benefit of inviting further development of these methodological elements. The methodological pluralism seen by many as characteristic of the English school can be confusing and can restrict the ability of the English school to reach out to other branches of international relations theory that are more settled and confident in their methodological choices. This is a classic critique of those rooted in a US IR tradition that, in line with US political science more generally, has tended to place a much greater emphasis on methodological precision and clarity than the English school (e.g. Finnemore 2001). The emergence of greater recognition of the English school in the US, the affinity many see between the English school and social constructivism, and the strengthening of the sociological strands of English school methodology that have moved it away from the ‘craft discipline’ perspective of Bull (1966) and Jackson (2009) have helped begin to address this issue. The engagement by liberal solidarists with classic liberal 197

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political theory around human rights has also played an important role in developing the political theory of the English school. That line of engagement is also strengthened, if in distinctive ways, by those seeking to explore the history of the political thought of the English school and the way that history of political thought as a methodological approach can help shine light on why the English school takes the sorts of positions it does (e.g. Bain 2009).3 I have contributed to these methodological dimensions, and also to the historiographical insights available to the English school, whilst remaining openminded and essentially pragmatic about how pluralism can benefit most from methodological reformulation. I may, though, prove to be wrong about eclecticism as the most effective methodological strategy. A second challenge that emerges from this project is the need to refine and develop the core ethical claims made in this book about the purchase a revived pluralism can gain on world politics. Pluralism is, of necessity, a somewhat minimalist normative project. My argument has been one about the inescapability of ethical dilemmas and competing normative positions playing themselves out in multiple dimensions, at multiple scales, and through multiple community memberships. Core principles about the limits of toleration, about what is and is not ethically defensible, what does and does not have a valid role to play in normative accounts of the future, have been limited. Intolerance, sclerosis, and exclusion have been postulated with some confidence as ethically indefensible. My view is that this, seemingly simple and limited, agenda goes further than many might first envisage in terms of proscriptions and prescriptions. It also, though, recalls my scepticism about ethics being about proscriptions and prescriptions. Judgement—finely balanced, often painful, always contested—is both the mode through which ethical action manifests itself in world politics and the key political virtue. ‘Phronesis’ is a term that has received significant recent attention in debates about ethics in international relations and whilst I have made no claim to knowledge of the classical world and the political theory that gives the term its principal reference point, the similarities are evident (e.g. Brown 2012). Good judgement and practical wisdom, though, are not restricted to those inhabiting established positions of authority. Ensuring and enabling access to the practice of judgement is therefore crucial, and is central to my development of an institution of resistance, rooted in a subaltern principle, which stands as my main contribution to the debate about institutions in the English school. This perspective—privileging those who gain least from existing power

3 I am grateful to Will Bain for conversations about his work in this direction, which point towards a major contribution to the intellectual history of the English school and the way in which this has impacted on its development, its structure, and the positions taken by its leading protagonists.

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structures—is core to the critical ambition of a revived pluralism, making it a progressive, radical dimension of English school theory, in sharp contrast to the standard portrayal. Nevertheless, the account of toleration offered and defended here is likely to be too permissive in many eyes; too tolerant of culturally embedded practices of subordination and discrimination; too deferential to existing practice on the basis of its sedimentation; and too easily dismissive of normatively more ambitious accounts of liberty, equality, and universality. This may be true, although there are at least two distinct reasons for that conclusion. The first, recalling Weinert’s (2011) reappraisal of the pluralist-solidarist debate, is that my assessment of the balance of empirical evidence about the progress of solidarism is wrong. I see the glass as being half empty, whereas it is really half full. As Weinert (2011) observes, though, this is the trap of macro-level assessment based on lists of empirical phenomena. The second is more powerful and comes down to a claim that pluralism is just incapable of effectively promoting the most powerful normative perspective on injustice, which is one that embraces universal human equality. The defence against that charge rests on two features of a revived pluralist project. The first is to restate the power of the subaltern perspective and the institution of resistance that I have sought to add to the usual English school list of institutions. The second reiterates the falsity of a necessary dichotomy between pluralism and solidarism. There is, on pluralist grounds, a need to avoid the conservative tendency of assuming that social practices, normative visions, and ethical standards that exist, and especially those that are portrayed as having existed for a considerable period of time, are deserving of respect on those grounds alone. To the extent that resistance draws on universality, equality, and liberty—and many forms of resistance to practices such as colonialism, racism, and misogyny do so to great effect—then pluralism offers no necessary obstacle to the advancement of cosmopolitan agendas. The effective ubiquity of the language of rights, with its inherent appeal to universality, is indicative of the way in which such practice can and does advance cosmopolitanism. Pluralism has no reasons to object to such claims, discourse, or the action it inspires. What it does seek to do, though, is to recognize and engage a host of other ways—local, specific ways—of expressing normative aspirations and offering ethical judgement, sometimes rooted in very different accounts of notions of human moral agency from those animating the liberal rights perspective. Judgement and practical wisdom within pluralism are rooted in a commitment to the importance of political action, a debt owed most obviously to Hannah Arendt, and therefore, also, the indeterminate nature of the outcome of action. It also, though, reinforces the commitment to access to meaningful action and the virtuousness of judgement, because it is the intra and 199

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intercommunal testing of ideas and the exercising of judgement that enables the winnowing of the intolerant and sclerotic from our communities and the ethical values they manifest and promote, both in tune with and against those of other communities of which we as individuals are simultaneously members. This is the price that is unavoidably paid for a pluralist conception of this sort. If pluralism is to make the normative claim that I have argued it must— that the ethical diversity of human communities is good—it cannot back away from this conclusion. The particular formulation of a revived pluralism will benefit from further detailed study of specific cases. I have sketched some examples in Chapter 5 to show how pluralist ethics can be applied in a range of crucial contemporary international ethical fields. However, pluralism offers great scope for careful and systematic research into contemporary and historical instances with the potential to cast far greater light on the way in which normative change occurs in the sorts of instances that pluralism sees as being most important, because they are the most challenging. This conclusion so far seems to amount to a call for better philosophy, social theory, sociology, ethnography, and methodology in reviving English school pluralism. Such things would, surely, improve pretty much any theory of international relations and efforts to apply it to the endlessly complex, troubled, changing, and fascinating world that we inhabit. I do, though, claim, to have offered a more systematic and specific account of these things than English school pluralism has so far been able to call upon. Such caveats are also a useful way of covering one’s back and acknowledging one’s limitations—who could deny that they could be a better philosopher, social theorist, sociologist, ethnographer, and methodologist? More positively, this states what in one sense is obvious: the revival of the pluralist project in the English school must be a collective endeavour. It will suffice if this book encourages others to add their thoughts to the how and why of a revived pluralism, as opposed to repeating the announcement of its death as a plausible intellectual position.

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Index

accountability 109, 141, 166, 168 Adler, Emanuel 76 Afghanistan 155, 167 Africa, wealth distribution in 140 AFRICOM (Africa Command) 159 Agamben, Giorgio 23, 101 agreements 11, 62, 76, 87, 90, 122, 151 Ahmed, Habib 119 n 2. anarchy 13, 16, 75, 83, 98, 188 anti-colonialism 121, 137, 143 anti-globalization movement 28, 141, 142–3 apartheid 67, 99, 194 Arab Spring 95, 99 Arendt, Hannah 6, 22, 25, 35, 37, 38, 67, 94, 109, 153, 171 international society 187, 189 loneliness 20–1, 56, 67, 153, 165–6 political action 55, 92, 160, 161, 189, 195, 199 ‘space in-between’ 30, 57 totalitarianism 20–1, 56, 57, 166 violence 139 Asad, Talal 23 asylum seekers 102 Augustine, Saint 23, 91 authenticity 99–100 authoritarianism 26, 31, 32, 56, 80, 83, see also totalitarianism authority 2, 12, 31, 49, 59, 65, 96–7 authors of 109–10 legitimate 115, 117, 137 life and death 165, 166 moral 173 narrative and 55, 64 obligation to 91 religious 66, 81, 101, 119 sovereignty and 43, 117–18, 121 violence and 139–40, 147, 190 Ayoob, Mohammad 130–1, 157, 179 Bain, Will 53–4, 198 n 3. balance of power 11, 59, 111 Ban Ki Moon 61 Barthes, Roland 126

Beitz, Charles 27, 170 Benedict, Pope 66 Benhabib, Seyla 52, 53, 67, 100, 128, 129, 154, 175 Bergson, Henri 23 Berlin, Isaiah 121 Bilgin, Pinar 134 Bin Laden, Osama 101 Blair, Tony 89 n 1. Blanchard, Eric 88 Blue Peter television programme 114 n 1. Booth, Ken 63, 105, 106, 157–8, 160 Brazil 80 BRIC/BRICS states 14, 123 Broad, Stuart 114 n 1. Brown, Chris 76 Buchanan, Allen 59, 65–6, 68, 166 Bull, Hedley 3, 18 n. 3, 40, 122, 197 The Anarchical Society 2, 10, 12, 86, 111, 121, 151, 153 classical approach to pluralism 16, 39, 53, 151 The Hagey Lectures 121, 190 on international society 109, 150 irreducibility of individuals 150, 152–3 list of institutions 11, 111, 121, 146–7 Michael Walzer reviewed by 136 moral scepticism of 15, 18 n. 3, 49 ‘revolt against the west’ 84 rules in international society 11, 75–6, 82, 151 types of knowledge 47 on world society 191–2 Burke, Edmund 53, 58 Bush, George W. 101 Bush Doctrine 107 Butterfield, Herbert 53 Buzan, Barry 2, 47, 62, 73, 78, 83, 98, 152 on China’s rise 81 ‘dark-side’ to social practice 125, 131, 132, 148 English school theory 16, 18–19, 34, 48, 62, 70, 74, 98, 178, 181, 191 historical surveys 111, 153

Index Buzan, Barry (cont.) on institutions 7, 11, 112–25, 131, 140 on international community 90 on international society 70, 79–80, 82, 187 on international system 183, 186 pluralist-solidarist debate 124, 151, 154, 155 on world society 178, 181–2, 191, 192–3 Bybee memorandum (2002) 101–2 Canada 156 Caney, Simon 27, 170 capitalism 118, 133, 140, 173, 174, 188, 193 categorical imperative 24, 27, 105 Catholic Church 66, 68, 104 Chakrabarty, Dipesh 129 Chandler, Raymond 114 change: coercive 45, 91, 99 communities 26, 31, 32, 53, 63, 67, 70–1, 93 international society 98–108, 110 knowledge practices 43–4, 45, 51, 65 natality 56 chess analogy 113–14 child mortality 85–6, 140 child sex abuse 63, 66, 67, 68 China 23, 148, 156 centrality of the state 150 diplomatic practice 151 and English school 80–1, 129–30 market economy in 118 rise of 14, 81, 138 Christianity 42, 51, 76, see also Catholic Church Churchill, Winston 104–5, 139 citizen informers 166, 168 citizenship 64, 101, 125, 152, 158, 162, 165–6, 170, 174 civil society 28, 74, 80, 84, 117, 168, 170, 171, 172, 174, 177, 179, 188, 193, see also NGOs Clark, Ian 116, 117, 124 ‘clash of civilizations’ 81–2 Coady, C. A. J. 137, 138 Cochran, Molly 37, 41, 44 coercion 12, 27, 31, 38, 45, 79, 82, 84, 91, 97, 99, 117, 132, 138, 156, 158, 161 coercion–calculation–consent 98–9, 124 Cohn, Carol 184, 195 Cold War 10, 57, 123, 146, 184–5 collateral damage issue 147, 163, 164, 165 collective law enforcement 150, 151 colonialism 4, 13, 62, 78, 79, 111, 126, 133, 138, 148, 199 common good 2, 68, 98, 186, 190, 192 communism 118 communities: change within 26, 31, 32, 53, 63, 67, 70–1, 93

216

diversity of scales 103–4, 106 dynamism of 6, 32, 34, 35, 53, 61–2, 70, 88, 93, 97–8, 144, 176 inclusiveness 31, 35, 60, 95 international 79, 89–98, 123 narrative and 52–3 verb form of 93, 94, 96–7, 144, 154, 160, 193–4, see also political communities compliance 112, 114, 116–17, 119, 124, 132, 142, 143 Confucianism 81, 129, 130, 148 Connolly, William E. 23–4, 25, 50–1 consensus 12, 13, 22, 40–1, 43, 44, 58, 63, 76, 84, 87, 97, 104, 116, 143, 178 constitutive rules 75, 77, 86, 95–7, 113–15, 117, 119, 131, 132 context 4, 19, 22, 24, 26–31, 60, 62, 101 contingency 25, 70, 88, 91, 143, 153, 156 cosmopolitan harm conventions 125, 174–5, 183, 196 cosmopolitanism 14, 22, 32, 58, 94, 95, 148, 157, 158, 177, 199 counterpublics 22–3, 42, 128 Cox, Robert 126 crimes against humanity 87, 157, see also war crimes criminality 125, 132, 148 critical security studies 157–8 crusades, language of 137 n 3. cultural harm debates 172–4 culture 21–2, 41, 52, 79, 82, 94, 100, 129–30, 133, 134 currency control 118 Dawkins, Richard 30 decolonization 40, 61, 77, 78, 79, 146, 156 Delanty, Gerard 20, 21–2, 51, 94, 98, 187 Deleuze, Gilles 23, 126 democracy 10, 22, 23, 25, 58, 94, 108, 166, 170, 171 derivative primary institutions 112, 120, 121, 122–3, 131–2, 138, 144 Deudney, Daniel 81 deviance 132, 134, 142, 143, 161, 162 diplomacy 11, 59, 109, 111, 150–1, 156, 157 discourse ethics 30, 125, 128–9, 175 discrimination 67, 125, 131, 136, 137, 199 distributive justice, see justice domestic violence 42 Donnelly, Jack 119 drone strikes 150, 162 n. 1, 163–9, 177 Dunne, Tim 5, 81, 152 dynamism, see communities; globalization Eichmann, Adolf 105 Elias, Norbert 125, 175 Elshtain, Jean Bethke 91

Index emancipation 129, 157–8, 160 England rugby union team 114 n 1. English school theory 1–3, 49, 58, 149, 155, 157, 181, 182, 197–200 Buzan’s reformulation of 16, 18–19, 34, 48, 62, 70, 74, 98, 151, 178, 181, 186–7, 191 China and 80–1, 129 Cochran on 37 context and 28 distributive theory 150 distrust of natural law 82 globalization 73–4, 78, 191 historical approach of 53, 54 humanitarian intervention debates 87, 91 Hurrell on 24, 33, 34 institutions 62, 142, 145, 146 international community 90, 93 international society 73, 79, 176, 187–91, 193 international system 183–7 just war theory 64 knowledge types 45–6 methodologies 39–40, 61, 159 ‘middle way’ 143, 171, 178 neglect of gender by 88, 141 neglect of the market by 78, 141 order 75–6, 82–3, 83, 145 social practices 61, 62, 123 targeted killing 169 United States and 197 virtues of 22, see also solidarism environmental issues 141, 158, 170 epistemological issues 29–31, 36–9, 43, 44, 46, 49–52, 54, 58–60, 65–6, 68, 69, 70, 72, 108, 146 equality 66, 82, 83, 87, 102, 121, 122, 170, 172, 176, 199, see also human rights; wealth distribution ethics 32, 35, 37, 44, 94, 125, 177–9, 189–90, 197–200 choices and 194–5 cosmopolitan 14, 22, 32, 58, 95, 148, 157, 158, 177, 199 discourse 30, 125, 128–9, 175 distributive justice 169–71 diversity 17, 18, 60, 83, 128, 179, 200 drones 163, 165, 166, 169 just war theory 64, 68, 104–6, 136–7, 147, 168 ‘narrative intelligibilifying’ 63, 67 non-intervention and 45 of a power structure 107, 126 practical 58, 59 realism 186 warfare and 100–1, 104–5, 136–7, 167, see also epistemological issues ethnic cleansing 3, 85, 157

European Union 42, 69, 102 exclusion 11, 16, 27, 32, 77–8, 82, 90, 93–4, 136, 161, 184, 190, see also non–state actors extraordinary rendition 101 fables 54 Fabre, Cecile 137 female genital mutilation 67 First World War 105 foreign occupation 96, 138, 195 Foucault, Michel 60 n. 4, 61 n. 4, 126, 159 Franck, Thomas 117 Fraser, Nancy 20, 22–3, 42, 128 freedom of information 102, 118 free movement of people 118 Freud, Sigmund 17 Frost, Mervyn 92 fundamentalist movements 67, 81, 101 Gadamer, Hans-Georg 17 gender 66, 68, 88, 121–2, 141, 173, 179 Geneva Conventions (1949) 115 genocide 67, 85, 157, 194 global civil society 28, 74, 80, 84, 170, 174, 179, 188 global distributive justice, see justice global financial crisis (2008) 141 globalization 9, 10, 22, 78–80, 83, 84, 88, 90, 100, 129, 160 cultural ethics and 128 English school and 73–4, 191 exclusivity and 94–5 global justice and 170, 171–2 protesters against 28, 141, 142–3 repressive political systems and 174 social relations and 176 transnational criminality 125 global politics, see world politics Gonzalez-Pelaez, Ana 89, 90 Gramsci, Antonio 59, 126 Gross, Leo 79 Grotianism 43, 88, 178, see also international society Grotius, Hugo 15 Gulf War 84 Habermas, Jürgen 17, 22, 30, 175, see also discourse ethics Hardt, Michael 23 harm 125, 165, 172–5, 177, 183, 196 harmony 81 history 13 n. 1, 41, 47, 53–4, 58, 59, 78–9, 82, 108, 134 Hobbes, Thomas 3, 12, 75, 185 Hobbesian tradition 18, 70, 88, 136, 140, 182, 184, 185, see also international system

217

Index Hobson, John 13 n. 1, 79, 86 Holocaust 105 Holsti, K. J. 111, 120 human agency 52, 55, 68, 70, 72, 190 humanitarian intervention 9, 14, 18, 84–5, 87, 89 n. 1, 91, 121, 123, 152, 156, 189 human nature 17, 20, 27, 32, 57 human rights 10, 14, 56, 91, 108, 122, 133, 152, 156, 198 abuses 84–5, 170 China 129 India 143 international society and 190 language of 106 law 157 NGOs and 170, 171, 172, 179, 193 Saudi Arabia 82 social practice and 101–2 targeted killing and 168, 193 human security agenda 152, 153, 155–62, 192 Hume, David 53 Huntington, Samuel P. 82 Hurrell, Andrew 9–10, 12, 14, 24, 25, 32, 34, 36, 44, 71, 73, 74, 103, 123, 151 Ignatieff, Michael 121, 170–1, 172, 175, 176–7, 179 Ikenberry, G. John 81 imperialism 13, 130, 143 India 80, 126, 129, 131, 133, 143 institutions 62, 111–48 grounded theory of 120, 135, 141–2, 146 historical development of 79 primary 7, 11, 112, 119, 120–3, 131–5, 138, 143, 144, 155 secondary 11–12, 69, 119, 123, 124, 131, 144 subaltern 112, 126–35 insurgency 138, 147 intelligence gathering 163, 166 International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICCISS 2001) 61, 87, 156–7 international community 75, 89–98, 123 international law 11, 43, 69, 77, 78, 109, 111, 120, 151, 193 International Monetary Fund (IMF) 144 international relations (IR) theory 1, 5, 16, 37, 73, 74, 76, 87–8, 98, 125, 130, 145, 155, 180, 197 international society 2–3, 12, 15, 30, 31, 39, 68–70, 187–91 change in 98–108, 110 Chinese 129–30, 148 common good 36–7, 40, 186 community and 89–96 exclusivist 11, 16, 27, 32, 77–8, 82, 90, 93–4, 136, 161, 184, 190

218

‘global gangster’ 10 Grotian 43, 88 historical development of 13 n 1. institutions of 25, 62, 64, 111–48 narrative status of 79, 93, 108–9 nationalism and 16, 17 order in 18, 43–4, 75–89, 176 pluralist-solidarist debate 124, 150–5, 161, 162, 183, 199 polycentric model of 80–1 pragmatism 58–9 rationalism and 185 resistance and 132–4 Responsibility to Protect principle 14, 61, 62, 77, 87, 121, 156, 170 subaltern realism and 130–1 ‘vanguard’ approach to 79, 82, 86 Westphalian 182 international system 12, 61, 70, 75, 78, 79, 88, 98, 156, 178, 183–7, 191–2 interrogation centres 101 intolerance 31, 61, 70, 72, 84, 93, 95, 144, 148, 184, 185, 194, 198, 200 Iran 156 Iraq 84, 99 Iraq War (2003) 90, 156 Islam 51, 68, 100–1, 111, 168, 193 Islamic finance 118–19 Islamism 81, 101 Israel 103 Jackson, Robert 5, 18, 25, 39, 40, 59, 78, 87, 104, 111, 152, 197 James, Alan 10 James, William 23, 50–1 Japan 156 Jewish Diaspora 103 Jews 31, 66 jihad 105, 167 justice 12, 26, 68, 82, 86–7, 95, 122, 125, 139, 152, 189, 190 global distributive 3, 27, 97, 150, 169–79, 192 Islamic 118 and order dichotomy 76, 81, 121, 176, see also international law; Sharia law just war theory 55, 64, 68, 104–6, 136–7, 147, 168 Kantian categorical imperative 24, 27, 105 Kantian tradition 88, 174, 178, 184, see also world society Kayaoglu, Turan 78, 80, 133 Keene, Edward 13 n. 1, 78, 82 Kelsay, John 64 Kissinger, Henry 140 knowledge/knowledge claims 29–30, 35–8

Index international politics and 68–71 pluralism and 41–2 political 42–3, 44, 60–8 privileged expertise and 65, 68 types 45–60, see also epistemological issues Kochi, Tarik 126, 130 Koivisto, Marjo 81 Krasner, Stephen 1, 102 Lang, Anthony 55, 64 Lasswell, Harold 47 legitimacy 17, 62, 99, 115, 116–17, 119, 124, 135–40, 158 liberalism 65, 68, 91–2, 128, 137, 175 liberty 4, 26, 87, 99, 102, 156, 199 Libyan revolution (2011) 99 Linklater, Andrew 30, 125, 128, 174–5, 177, 183, 196 Little, Richard 2, 40, 78, 111, 152, 186 Locke, John 14 loneliness 20–1, 56, 67, 153, 165–6 McGlynn, Clare 172 Machiavelli, Niccolò 99, 185 Mackinnon, Donald 44 Manning, Charles 40, 113, 114 marginalization 107, 131, 132, 184 market 118–19, 121, 122, 132, 133, 140–4 Marx, Karl 107, 195 Marxism 27, 59, 126 master primary institutions 112, 120–3, 131–2, 135, 143, 144, 155, see also derivative primary institutions mathematics 48, 51 May, Larry 106 Mayall, James 10, 11, 16, 17, 53, 59, 111, 152, 186 mercantilism 62, 111 metaethical theory 66 migration flows 28, 102, 158, 167 Mill, J. S. 99 moral agency 32, 37, 71, 101, 106, 114, 199 moral authority 173 moral dilemmas 33, 63, 71, 85, 189 moral philosophy 4, 15, 19, 24, 27, 105 moral truth 29, 51, 65–6 Morgenthau, Hans 17, 186 multiple community membership 28, 32, 35, 60, 98, 103, 104, 142, 173, 176, 183, 187, 189, 190, 198 narcotics 28, 63, 132 narrative knowledge 47, 51–7, 62–5, 67, 70, 71, 108, 134–5, 144 natality 56 nationalism 11, 16, 17, 31, 43, 52, 111, 121, 143

national liberation movements 102, 107, 121, 137, 146 NATO 84, 99 natural law 15, 32, 82 Navari, Cornelia 39, 178 Nazism 21, 57, 66, 67, 137, 166 Negri, Antonio 23 neo-realism 16, 17, 98 Neumann, Iver B. 76 new social movements 95, 133, 141, 142–3 NGOs (non-governmental organizations) 87, 95, 102, 161, 171, 172, 179, 193 non-intervention principle 4, 41, 43, 45, 62, 80, 87, 103, 120–1, 123, 143 non-state actors 9, 11, 12, 36, 77, 102, 136, 184, 193 Norway 156 nuclear weapons 9, 57, 164, 184–5 Obama, Barack 162 Occupy movement 133, 141 ontology/ontological claims 49, 88–90, 102, 103, 168, 188 Arendtian 6, 20, 35, 94 context and 28–9 international society 108–9 pluralism 19, 21, 22, 30, 37, 92, 187 order 75–89, 121, 125, 140, 145, 176, 187–8 O’Scanlon, Rosalind 126 pacifism 111, 138, 147 Pakistan 167–8, 169 Palestinian Authority 77 paternalism 166–7 Peake, Mervyn, Gormenghast 93, 95 people traffickers 28, 132 philosophy 2, 4, 14–15, 37, 45, 47, 49, 107, 168, 197, 200 phronesis 198 plagiarism 114 n 1. Pogge, Thomas 27, 170, 171 political communities 2, 4, 27, 32, 39, 43–4, 46, 97, 109, 143–4, 175, 191 defined 94 Delanty on 21–2, 94 independent 153, 160, 186 narrative and 51 nation state 75, 80, 102–3 recognition of sovereignty 41, 69, 102–3 religion and 42, 81 resistance and 137 Schoenborg on 90 political economy 118, 135, 141 political knowledge 42–4 political philosophy 4, 15, 19, 21, 27, 197

219

Index politics 25–6, 32, 33, 37, 42 Arendtian 20, 21, 30, 35, 37, 55–7, 92, 94, 139, 160, 189, 195, 199 death by 85 knowledge and 44, 60–72 Lasswell’s dictum on 47 narrative 54, 56–7, see also world politics polycentrism 80, 81 pornography 63, 172 post-structuralism 59, 60, 126, 159–60 poverty 140–1, 158, 170, 173 power 11, 12, 26, 28, 38, 43, 47, 56, 59, 101, 107, 109–11, 116, 126, 158, 160, 179 ‘practice turn’ 40 n. 1, 76 pragmatic knowledge 47, 58–60, 70 presentism 119 primary institutions 7, 11, 112, 119–23, 131–5, 138, 143, 144, 155 progressivism 4, 25–7, 31–3, 35, 110 property 11, 76, 122, 140, 151 proportionality 136, 137 public sphere 22–3 racism 99, 125, 199 Rackley, Erika 172 rationalism 81, 138, 185 Rawls, John 27, 92, 170 realism 15–17, 130–1, 140, 157, 171, 179, 182, 185–7 regulatory rules 95–7, 113–17, 124, 131, 132 relativism 24, 65, 66, 69, 126, 139, 162 religion 32, 52, 153, see also Christianity; Islam religious belief 42, 54, 66, 67 religious freedom 82, 102 religious knowledge 29, 30–1, 48–50 religious wars 4, 105, 167 repression 31, 36, 125, 129, 131, 179, 184 resistance 23, 141, 144, 145, 161, 169, 174, 179 to drone strikes 167–8, 169, 193 as a master primary institution 132–5, 143, 146, 155, 193, 198, 199 social movements 142–3 violent 137–9 Responsibility to Protect principle 14, 61, 62, 77, 87, 121, 156, 170 Reus-Smit, Christian 143 revolutions/revolutionism 56, 77, 99, 115, 129, 139, 140, 171, 185 Rodin, David 106, 169, 170–1, 175 Roth, Brad 170, 171 Ruggie, John Gerard 28 rules 2, 3, 11, 16, 40, 76–7, 83, 93, 98–9, 151 constitutive 75, 77, 86, 95–7, 113–15, 117, 119, 131, 132 regulatory 95–7, 113–17, 124, 131, 132 ‘rules of the game’ analogy 113–14, 117

220

Russia 141, 156 Rwanda 84 Saudi Arabia 82 Schouenborg, Laust 90, 92, 113, 118, 119 Schuett, Robert 17 secondary institutions 11–12, 69, 119, 123, 124, 131, 144 Second World War 104–5, 137, see also Nazism security, see human security agenda self-determination, see sovereignty Sharia law 111, 119 Shaw, Martin 106 Shue, Henry 170, 171 Singer, Peter 170, 171 slavery 31, 63, 67, 190 social constructivism 16, 39, 61, 197 social interaction 40, 93, 166, 186, 191–2, 196 socialization 79, 133 social practices 40, 43, 44, 60–5, 114, 142, 175, 199 altered 104, 168 authority in 101, 117–18 ‘dark side’ to 125, 131, 132, 148 drones disruption to 167–8 ethical discourse and 3–4, 105–6, 116, 154 institutions as durable 7, 62, 112, 116, 119–20, 122, 123, 131–3, 193 warfare and 142 social-structural theory 18, 98 social structures 41, 55, 59, 61, 65–6, 76, 98, 125, 126, 160, 190, 197, see also political communities society of states, see international society sociology 20, 22, 52, 120, 125 solidarism 9–10, 13–15, 17, 18, 20, 21, 24–6, 30, 32, 34, 41, 43, 86, 108 solidarist-pluralist debate 124, 150–5, 161, 162, 183, 188, 199 sovereignty 2, 43, 45, 62, 77, 83, 91, 143, 144, 148 authority and 43, 117–18, 121 capitalism and 193 contingency and 25, 70, 88, 156 decline of 103 equality 78–9 human rights and 106 legitimate use of violence and 17, 82 political communities attaining 41, 69, 80, 102–3, 190 territory and 117–18 Westphalian 11, 12, 15, 24, 121 Soviet Union 166, 185 Spinoza, Baruch 23 statehood 12, 69, 77, 80, 102–3 states: centrality of 34, 75, 130, 144, 150, 187

Index moral hierarchy of 91–2 nation 28, 67, 71, 80, 89, 91, 94 security 152, 153, 155–62, 184, 192 self-identification 156 war and 77, 136–7, 147 wealth distribution 140–1, 142, 173, 189, see also Westphalian system statism 10–11, 31, 45, 80, 84, 90, 95, 98, 108, 130–1, 137, 143, 150, 152, 182 Steele, Brent 109 Stirk, Peter 78–9, 96, 138 Strauss, Leo 23 subaltern counterpublics 23, 42, 128 subaltern perspective 107, 145, 157, 159, 164, 167, 177 institutions 112, 126–35, 143, 144, 145, 165 resistance 138, 167, 169, 193, 198, 199 subaltern realism 130–1, 157, 179 subaltern studies movement 59, 126–7, 135 Suganami, Hidemi 54, 63, 67 ‘supreme emergency’ (Walzer) 137, 138, 142 surveillance 163, 164–7 targeted killing 162–9, 177, 179, 192 technological innovation 28, 95, 100, 103, 176, 192 territoriality 121, 166 territory 41, 117–18, 121 occupied 96, 138, 195 terrorism 85, 101, 102, 132, 134, 159, 190, see also ‘war on terror’ Thucydides 185 toleration 61, 70, 190, 194, 198, 199 torture 55, 70, 85, 101–2, 106, 107, 147, 190 totalitarianism 4, 56, 109, 165, 166, 184 Arendt on 20–1, 56, 57, 166 transcendental knowledge 47, 48–51, 70 transnational corporations 31, 102, 117 truth 29, 30, 31, 49–51, 53–4, 62, 63, 65–7, 71–2 United Nations (UN) 11, 77, 144 Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989) 63 drone strike casualty figures 163 n 2 Security Council 123 World Summit (2005) 61, 62, 157 United States 159, 185 Bush doctrine 107 IR tradition 197 security and 159 targeted killing 162–3, 164, see also ‘war on terror’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) 82

universal-individual framework 171–9, 188, 189, 192 universalism 32, 57, 83, 125, 177, 189 utopia 27, 195–6 Vincent, John 13, 14, 84, 120–1 violence 36, 64, 67, 115, 122, 135–45, 151, 184 domestic 42 political 135–40, 190 privatized 102 rules around 11, 76, 151 sanctified glory of 167 sovereignty and 17 targeted killing 162–9, 179, 192, see also warfare Walzer, Michael 104, 105, 136–7 war crimes 87, 122, 157, 190 warfare 14, 59, 96, 111 institution of 11, 115, 135–40, 142, 150 Iraq War 90, 156 just war theory 55, 64, 68, 104–6, 136–7, 147, 168 nuclear 9, 57, 164, 184–5 preventive 107 subaltern approach to 130 technological advances in 100, see also violence ‘war on terror’ 96, 101, 105, 147 Washbrook, David 126 Watson, Adam 40, 78, 111 wealth distribution 140–1, 142, 173, 189 Weber, Max 17 Weinert, Matthew 176, 180 human security agenda 155, 156, 159, 160, 161 pluralist-solidarist debate 86–7, 150–4, 183, 199 Welsh, Jennifer 13–14, 76, 84 Wendt, Alexander 16, 98, 124 Westphalia, Peace of 78, 79 Westphalian system 11, 12, 24, 75, 78, 88, 103, 108, 121, 133, 182 Wheeler, Nicholas 9, 85, 87, 91, 123, 152 Wight, Martin 61, 146, 185, 187 Wikileaks 105 Wilde, Oscar 195–6 Williams, Desmond 44 Wilson, Peter 120, 135, 141–2, 146 World Economic Forum 95 world politics 1, 5, 97, 109–10, 143, 161–2, 179, 190, 195, 198 changing 34, 74, 90, 140 choice of term 3, 73–4 community politics 196–7 human politics 21, 48, 193

221

Index world politics (cont.) human rights 84–5, 106, 125–6 international society and 40, 69, 73–5, 78, 83, 85–6, 89, 103, 145–6, 188 moral dilemmas in 85, 189 non-state 74, 78, 103, 131 targeted killing 162–9, 177, 179, 192 transnational criminal activity 125, 132 world society 8, 41, 70, 86, 148, 149, 151, 152, 156, 161 Bull on 191–2

222

Buzan on 34, 178, 181–2, 186, 191, 192–3 institutions and 145–6 Kantian 88, 178 non-statist 90, 143 pluralist 149, 191–7 Wight’s categorization 185, 187 Yemen 168, 193 Yugoslavia 84 Zanu-PF 107