The Historical Expansion of International Society

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barry Buzan ◽  
Richard Little
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
International Society ◽  
English School ◽  
Historical Contingency ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
The West ◽  
Planetary Scale ◽  
The World ◽  
Related Line

For most English School writers, the international society is an element that is always present in international relations, but whose depth, character, and influence all fluctuate with historical contingency. The historical wing of the English School focuses on how the contemporary global international society came about as a result of the expansion to planetary scale of what was originally a novel type of international society that emerged in early modern Europe. This is partly a story of power and imposition, and partly one of the successful spread and internalization beyond the West of Western ideas such as sovereignty and nationalism. It is also a story about what happens when international society expands beyond the cultural heartland which gave birth to it. The classical story has been critiqued for being too Eurocentric and underplaying the fact that European international society did not emerge fully formed in Europe and then spread from there to the rest of the world. Rather, it developed as it did substantially because it was already spreading as it emerged, and was thus in its own way as much shaped by the encounter as was the non-European world. A related line of critique points out the conspicuous and Eurocentric failure of the classical story to feature the fact that colonialism was a core institution of European international society.

The Anarchical Society as Christian Political Theology

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
William Bain
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
International Society ◽  
Political Theology ◽  
Thomas Hobbes ◽  
English School ◽  
Political Relations ◽  
The World ◽  
Artificial Nature ◽  
Hedley Bull ◽  
The Universe

It is widely accepted that in The Anarchical Society—the key text of the English School—Hedley Bull presents and defends the Grotian conception of international relations. This essay argues that Bull’s thinking about order is indebted to a medieval theological dispute about the nature of God and the extent of his power. This dispute yields a way of knowing and explaining the world that stresses the artificial nature of political relations, domestic and international. In other words, order between states is instituted in the same way that God made the universe, through will and artifice. Once this theological ground is uncovered it becomes apparent that Bull’s account of international order is consistent, not with Grotius, but with the thought of Thomas Hobbes. One of the crucial implications of this argument is that international society has not outgrown its European and Christian roots to the extent that Bull suggests.

The Expansion of International Society

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel M. Green
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
International Society ◽  
Cultural Imperialism ◽  
English School ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
Phases Of Development ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The 19Th Century ◽  
Creativity And Innovation

The English School of international relations theory has its own particular account of the history of international relations, a key aspect of which is the expansion of a set of norms, practices and institutions—diplomacy, embassies, international law, sovereignty, the modern state—out of their formative cultural heartland of Europe and to the rest of the world over the past few centuries. This is the story of “European international society” spreading out to become a “global international society,” accelerating especially during the 19th century via cultural imperialism and colonial conquest. The writings of the English School on this Expansion Narrative have evolved since the 1960s, going through phases of development that have concretized the details of the Narrative’s history, elaborated on the processes behind the spread, and attempted to inject more scientific rigor into analysis. Over time a more profound challenge has also emerged, in a revisionist shift from a monocentric story of Europe training the rest of the world in the proper ways of domestic and international life, toward a polycentric, globalization model, in which different civilizations have learned from each other to create a synthetic, multicultural international society by the 21st century. These analytic tensions are a source of creativity and innovation for the English School and set it apart from other approaches to international relations.

The nineteenth century liberal tradition and the English School historical narrative

2020 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 171-189
Author(s):  
Daniel M Green
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
International Relations ◽  
International Society ◽  
Previous Experiment ◽  
Global Scale ◽  
Historical Narrative ◽  
English School ◽  
The West ◽  
Liberal Tradition ◽  
New Imperialism

This article uses the framework of “traditions of thought” and “dilemmas” to problematize and revise the English School’s Expansion Narrative of international relations history in the crucial nineteenth century, when the forms and practices of “European international society” expanded to dominate the world’s international relations. An exercise in historicizing and contextualizing the broader liberal tradition of international thought brings into focus a period of liberal ideas and policies in the first-half of the nineteenth century, before Expansion and the New Imperialism, and a particular “free trade” liberal order project adopted by Britain in the years 1830–1865 in particular. This brings a different perspective to the ES historical narrative of expansion of the European international society into a “global international society.” The article contextualizes ideas in the nineteenth century liberal tradition by highlighting a British global “unipolar moment” and the order project that accompanied it. It discusses the “dilemmas” that prompted the closing of that era and a shift in British thought and policy during the 1860s. These laid the foundation for the Expansion the English School focuses on after 1870, but also constitute a previous experiment in the engagement of the West with the Rest, with different potentialities, before the final onslaught of global-scale conquest.

Community of common destiny: China’s “new assertiveness” and the changing Asian order

2018 ◽  
Vol 73 (3) ◽  
pp. 449-463 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen N. Smith
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
International Society ◽  
International Relations Theory ◽  
Great Power ◽  
English School ◽  
Xi Jinping ◽  
The West ◽  
Normative Basis ◽  
Common Destiny ◽  
Modes Of Governance

This essay will discuss China’s re-emergence as a great power through the lens of the English School. Following Ian Clark, I reconceptualize international society as a set of historically changing principles of legitimacy. I argue that China’s “new assertiveness” under Xi Jinping is best explained by China’s pursuit of legitimacy in an international arena where norms of legitimate modes of governance, development, and ordering principles have long been defined by the West. Furthermore, this essay will examine one recent development in Chinese International Relations theory, gongsheng, which purports to offer an alternative normative basis for interstate order, and probe its relationship to Xi Jinping’s recent declaration to build a “community of common destiny” in Asia.

scholarly journals Abazi, Enika, & Albert Doja (2016) "International Representations of Balkan Wars: A Socio-Anthropological Account in International Relations Perspective" Cambridge Review of International Affairs

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Enika Abazi ◽  
Albert Doja
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
International Society ◽  
International Relations Theory ◽  
International Affairs ◽  
Southeast Europe ◽  
The West ◽  
Balkan Wars ◽  
The World ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The Way

This article introduces the socio-anthropological concept of international representations to examine the relationship between a civilizational rhetoric, the West European and the international politics of otherization and containment of Southeast Europe, and an essentialist and timeless bias in international relations theory, including both radical and constructivist trends. We first explore the different narrative perspectives on the Balkan wars from the beginning to the end of twentieth century. Their subsequent problematization is aimed at challenging the way how they have constructed commonplace and time-worn representations, which international society shares with different consequences in international affairs. This is a limited conception since international representations as a socio-anthropological concept are always socially, culturally and politically constructed, contested and negotiated. They do not neutrally refer to a reality in the world; they create a reality of their own. Moreover, this limited conception ignores the fact that how, by whom and in whose interest international representations are constructed is itself a form of power in international relations. Therefore, the way international representations are constructed can be problematized as an example of political and ideological projects that operate in the West as well as in the Southeast European countries that are the object of Western foreign policy.

Transition in Knowledge of Chinese Geography in Early Modern Europe: A Historical Investigation on Maps of China

Cultura ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 45-65
Author(s):  
Jingdong YU
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
New Production ◽  
The West ◽  
Process Of Change ◽  
Geographical Knowledge ◽  
Historical Investigation ◽  
Modern Europe ◽  
Intercultural Interactions

During the 17th and 18th centuries, European investigations into Chinese geography underwent a process of change: firstly, from the wild imagination of the classical era to a natural perspective of modern trade, then historical interpretations of religious missionaries to the scientific mapping conducted by sovereign nationstates. This process not only prompted new production of maps, but also disseminated a large amount of geographical knowledge about China in massive publications. This has enriched the geographical vision of Chinese civilization while providing a new intellectual framework for Europeans to understand China. Concurrently, it has formed another route for the travel of knowledge and intercultural interactions between the East and the West. Those interactions between space and knowledge have been reflected in the production, publication and dissemination of numerous maps of China in early modern Europe.

Islamic International Relations Towards a Theoretical Framework

2015 ◽  
Vol 1 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gubara Hassan
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
International Relations ◽  
Modern Society ◽  
Theoretical Framework ◽  
World Politics ◽  
Muslim World ◽  
The West ◽  
The Past ◽  
Alternative Approach ◽  
The World

The Western originators of the multi-disciplinary social sciences and their successors, including most major Western social intellectuals, excluded religion as an explanation for the world and its affairs. They held that religion had no role to play in modern society or in rational elucidations for the way world politics or/and relations work. Expectedly, they also focused most of their studies on the West, where religion’s effect was least apparent and argued that its influence in the non-West was a primitive residue that would vanish with its modernization, the Muslim world in particular. Paradoxically, modernity has caused a resurgence or a revival of religion, including Islam. As an alternative approach to this Western-centric stance and while focusing on Islam, the paper argues that religion is not a thing of the past and that Islam has its visions of international relations between Muslim and non-Muslim states or abodes: peace, war, truce or treaty, and preaching (da’wah).

scholarly journals The CSTO in new system of coordinates of the global international security. New calls and threats to security for the states of the CSTO and a form of response to them.

2016 ◽  
pp. 7-12
Author(s):  
A. A. Orlov
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
Historical Development ◽  
International Security ◽  
Present Moment ◽  
The West ◽  
The World ◽  
New System

Specifics of present moment of historical development is cardinal change of a geopolitical picture of the world. The period of partnership between Russia and the West came to an end. Partnership is succeeded by new structure of the international relations which will be constructed on much more pragmatic basis. At the same time it is obvious that the unipolar world was absolutely not effective. This world finally disbalanced all system of the international relations that was expressed in the number of the regional and local conflicts unprecedented before, and in return in the last two years of direct confrontation between Russia and the West.

scholarly journals Anarchy in International Relations

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Silviya Lechner
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
International Relations ◽  
International Society ◽  
English School ◽  
Ir Theory ◽  
Interaction Domain ◽  
Alternative Discourse ◽  
The Third ◽  
Analytical Review ◽  
International Anarchy

The concept of anarchy is seen as the cardinal organizing category of the discipline of International Relations (IR), which differentiates it from cognate disciplines such as Political Science or Political Philosophy. This article provides an analytical review of the scholarly literature on anarchy in IR, on two levels—conceptual and theoretical. First, it distinguishes three senses of the concept of anarchy: (1) lack of a common superior in an interaction domain; (2) chaos or disorder; and (3) horizontal relation between nominally equal entities, sovereign states. The first and the third senses of “anarchy”’ are central to IR. Second, it considers three broad families of IR theory where anarchy figures as a focal assumption—(1) realism and neorealism, (2) English School theory (international society approach), and (3) Kant’s republican peace. Despite normative and conceptual differences otherwise, all three bodies of theory are ultimately based on Hobbes’s argument for a “state of nature.” The article concludes with a summary of the key challenges to the discourse of international anarchy posed by the methodology of economics and economics-based theories that favor the alternative discourse of global hierarchy.

Die globale Dichtung des Orlando Furioso

2012 ◽  
Vol 47 (1) ◽  
pp. 16-33
Author(s):  
Federico Italiano
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Hybrid Vehicle ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
The West ◽  
Ludovico Ariosto ◽  
Orlando Furioso ◽  
The Earth ◽  
Epic Poem ◽  
Peter Sloterdijk ◽  
As If

AbstractThe epic poem of Ludovico Ariosto, Orlando Furioso (1516–1532), one of the most influential texts of Renaissance writing, shows not only a precise cognition of early modern cartographic knowledge, as Alexandre Doroszlaï has illustrated it in Ptolemée et l’hippogriffe (1998), but also performs a complex transmedial translation of cartographic depictions. The journeys around the globe of the Christian paladins Ruggiero and Astolfo narrated by Ariosto are, in fact, performative negotiations between literary and cartographic processes. Riding the Hippograph, the hybrid vehicle par excellence, Ruggiero and Astolfo fly over the Earth as if they were flying over a map. Their journeys do not merely transmedially translate the course to the West pursued by Early Modern Europe. Rather, by translating the map Ariosto performs a new geopoetics that turns away from the symbolic dominance of the East (or “Ent-Ostung”, as Peter Sloterdijk has usefully called it) and offers us one of the first poetic versions of modern globalization.

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