Abstract
This article argues that the distinction between international system and international society within the English School of International Relations theory, originally put forward by Bull and Watson, should not be abandoned. The distinction is shown to correspond to complementary etic and emic approaches to the study of social reality. The former approach is most appropriate for studying the unintended emergence of patterns of social organisation, the latter approach for the study of intersubjective negotiations over shared rules and norms within a bounded social context. Elaborating, rather than eliminating, the notion of international system suggests the adoption of the concept of ‘world system’ to complement the English School’s concept of world society. Drawing on the neo-Weberian sociology of Mann and Tilly, the article suggests that the concept of world system is not only theoretically coherent but also congruent with conceptualisations of large-scale change offered by contemporary world historians and historical sociologists.
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Notes
The key stage in Wendt’s argument occurs when he attempts to pull the rug from under the feet of materialist theories by arguing that all socially constructed relationships and structures are ideational in character (Wendt 1999: 93–96). Acceptance of this argument reduces materialist theories such as Marxism and neo-realism to ‘rump materialist’ theories concerned with the properties of physical artefacts. But Wendt’s approach stacks the deck against these approaches by focusing on social ontology rather than on the goals towards which social action is directed.
The discussion presented in this article focuses primarily on systemic processes that escape the intersubjective awareness of actors because they operate on large socio-spatial and temporal scales. But processes requiring explanation in etic terms may also operate on very small, sub-individual scales. Psychological research on the automaticity of mental processes suggests that the subjective, emic accounts that agents offer as explanation for their actions may be highly misleading (Bargh and Chartrand 1999). Thus, if the mind is opaque to itself, etic explanations may be necessary to supplement and correct emic accounts of even small-scale, face-to-face, norm-governed social interactions. I am grateful to one of my anonymous reviewers for pointing out this set of possibilities.
For example, the Frankfurt School critical theory might be said to operate according to a methodology that begins with an emic account of a mode of human consciousness, before moving to an immanent critique in terms of the concepts of that mode of consciousness and, finally, to an etic account of how that mode of consciousness mystifies the real social relationships that have given rise to it (Geuss 1981; Linklater 1990; Weber 2005).
Wendt does attempt to distinguish constitutive explanation from causal explanation (Wendt 1999: 77–78). However, within the scientific realist methodology that Wendt adopts, constitution is not separate from causation; the way in which structures and entities are constituted determines their causal powers and propensities (Jackson 2011: 107).
The anthropomorphisation here is intentional. Wendt holds that states can be considered persons with their own beliefs and agency, if not mental states (Wendt 2004).
This is not to say that an etic approach can only be used to examine systemic processes; rather, etic approaches are particularly well-suited to do so.
Tilly provides a summary of his position — which, rather unusually, is presented in verse — in a review essay on the work of James C. Scott (Tilly 1991).
Tilly states the point eloquently: ‘Paradoxically, the belief in societies as overarching social structures with their own logic dovetails neatly with the belief in the socially conditioned mental event as the prime link between person and society’ (Tilly 1984: 26).
See Fukuyama (2011) for a contemporary version of this liberal account of the rise of capitalism and the rule of law in the West.
Burton (1972: 36) also wants to distinguish between ‘interstate’ relations and the overall ‘cobweb’ of human social interactions. This thought-experiment involves imagining all transnational transactions and links, ‘a mass of cobwebs superimposed on one another, strands converging at some points more than others, and being concentrated between some points more than between others’ (Burton 1972: 43).
Unfortunately, Buzan does not elaborate on his reasons for resisting both Wallerstein’s view that there is one single world society (the capitalist world system) and Mann’s position that society is a misleading concept.
From a similar perspective, Linklater (2009) has suggested that scholars of international relations should set themselves the task of developing macro-historical accounts of human interconnectedness.
‘World-systems analysis means first of all the substitution of a unit of analysis called the “world-system” for the standard unit of analysis, which was the nation state’ (Wallerstein 2004: 16).
Possibly due to the effects of the Black Death, spread by the Mongols and by the Eurasian trade network (McNeill and McNeill 2003: 120; Morris 2010: 398–99). This might represent one significant example of wholly physical interaction between groups of human beings resulting in major social change.
The role of Portugal is accorded major significance by theorists of the long-cycle leadership perspective (Devezas and Modelski 2006).
It would be remiss not to acknowledge the obvious and important point that such system-building efforts were often bloody and involved the destruction of other societies and extended interhuman systems.
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Acknowledgements
A draft of this article was presented at the 2012 annual meeting of the British International Studies Association in Edinburgh. Earlier versions of the article were improved by constructive feedback offered by Ronnie Hjorth, three anonymous reviewers and the editors of the Journal of International Relations and Development.
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Lees, N. International society is to international system as world society is to …? Systemic and societal processes in English School theory. J Int Relat Dev 19, 285–311 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1057/jird.2014.20
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/jird.2014.20